Who the hell do you think you’re, Kiddo?I don’t do thinking, Sir. I simply improvise.

Punish me please, mistress,” I say in a very small voice.

Many of those who are humiliated are not humble. Some react to humiliation with anger, others with patience, and others with freedom. The first are culpable, the next harmless, the last just.

The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer’s [review of Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the...