The first thing I noticed when I moved to Britain in 1985 was that the literary reviews were usually mere summaries and rarely critical (What a hatchet job!, Review, 4 February). I used to complain to my British friends that any 12-year old could be a critic here. The idea of a new prize to improve the quality of criticism is commendable, but I fear that reviews which aim to be outright hatchet jobs will just give us the other extreme and not the kind of criticism that is needed. The word critic is derived from the Greek krinein which means to separate the good from the bad. Thus the job of the critic is not to do a hatchet ...