Harold Bloom has written another book crusading for literature’s days of yore. “The reason he sells books in their tens of thousands is that he has set himself against the tendency of universities to talk in relativist terms about literature, to promote cultural studies and to analyse books as part of a progressivist political project. Bloom loathes all this and in the past few years has done everything he can to reclaim the classics of literature for the general reader. This has involved a paradoxical restatement of the need for tradition and literary evaluation.”