"The trouble is that being a critic, even a very good one, doesn't require the pen's wielder to have led a fascinating existence." David Aaronovitch in the Times wasn't enraptured by John Carey's memoir The Unexpected Professor: "The truth appears to be that Carey hasn't really done anything or been anywhere, as indeed most of us haven't, but then most of us haven't published our autobiographies … there is a crosspatchedness, an uppityness about Carey's observations about the wider world that is genuinely surprising." Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph preferred to emphasise the book's "genial tone" and surprising chattiness. Plus "his prose remains as lean and buoyant as ever … If there were more academics with his energy and lucidity around, then literary criticism would be a happier discipline." In the paper where Carey has been a lead reviewer for decades, the Sunday Times, Robert Harris drew attention to his "deceptively polite wit and a schoolboyish delight in sticking it to the English upper classes whenever the opportunity arises". But the book also raised a question: "why … would someone who hates public schools spend his entire career as a professor in Oxford … ? But then it is this personal complexity – of being perhaps half in love with that which he most despises – that makes Carey such an original critic, and this memoir so entertaining to read." David Sexton in the Evening Standard was less polite: "… instead of incident, the memoir is extended with yet another potted guide to English literature … As a critic, Carey is, for all his scholarship, strangely simple-minded. He is driven by class-resentment … it distorts his judgment …"

Jake Kerridge in the Daily Telegraph gave five stars to The Black-Eyed Blonde, the Philip Marlowe novel by Benjamin Black AKA John Banville AKA the new Raymond Chandler: "The plot is dead right, and … the voice is spot on too … that this novel is so enjoyable is a testament to the effectiveness of the formula that Chandler laboured so hard to perfect." Olen Steinhauer in the New York Times agreed that the novel "could be passed off as a newly discovered Chandler manuscript found in some dusty La Jolla closet, leaving only linguistic detectives to ferret out the fraud". Yet in the end there was "a suggestion that literary style has triumphed over content, leaving a hollowed-out place where the emotion should have been". For Mark Anderson in the Evening Standard, "Black ticks all the boxes – a man with a gun in his hand comes through the door more than once – and the set-pieces, which include an interview with a starlet on a back-lot and a visit to a creepy, swanky country club staffed by oddballs, are magnificent."

Rebecca Mead's bibliomemoir The Road to Middlemarch received mixed reviews. According to Claire Harman in the Evening Standard, her "long experience of profile-writing shows in the effortless ease of her prose … I wish more critical books were this literary, and this readable." For Talitha Stevenson in the FT, Mead's "captivating and lucid book mixes biography, memoir and close reading to symphonic effect". But the Observer's Rachel Cooke wasn't so keen, finding it "somewhat laboured": "if there is anything new in this book, I'm damned if I can find it … The Road to Middlemarch wears its earnestness like Sunday best, only rarely cracking a smile, and thanks to this, it feels brutal to criticise it, particularly if you're also, as I am, a lover of Middlemarch. But I'd be lying if I said it spoke to me."