His review has got to be 'in' by mid-day tomorrow ... At about 9 pm his mind will grow relatively clear, and until the small hours he will sit ... skipping expertly through one book after another and laying each down with the comment, 'God, what tripe!' ... Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases - 'a book that no one should miss', 'something memorable on every page' - jump into their places like iron fillings obeying the magnet.

Thus did George Orwell, writing forty years ago in Confessions of a Book Reviewer, describe the labours of a typical literary hack. Judging by the incestuous stew of debts and allegiances that dominates today's world of books, precious little has changed over the intervening decades. The servility of reviewers continues to counterpoint the vanity of authors and the greed of their publishers.

Yet within this society of mutual admiration, lazy writing and genuflection to established hierarchy, one repository of fearless literary criticism stands out: the 'Literary Review' section of the satirical magazine Private Eye. Lord Gnome's Literary Companion assembles, in thematic order, the best of these columns to present an astringent, rude and funny survey of publishers and the published.

It identifies new genres - such as the 'non-book' celebrity vehicle - as well as giving due recognition to those who, against all odds, genuinely have something to say. It devotes review space to authors who, whilst dominating the bestseller lists, are all but ignored by the literary establishment - and it does so without the breathless celebration of the popular observed by too many practitioners of 'cultural studies'.

1. It probes the unseen forces that police our literary culture - the literary agents, the cross-media magnates, the PR gigolos. In keeping with the Private Eye tradition, the contributors are anonymous, giving writers the freedom they cannot find in other publications. For Lord Gnome's reviewers there are no sacred cows, no special favours, no treacly euphemisms. It's messy, dangerous work, but someone has to do it.