How many people know that Aristotle thought the best tragedies were those which ended happily? Or that the first mention of the motor car in literature may have been in 1791 in Boswell's Life of Johnson? Or that it was not unknown in the nineteenth century for book reviews to be 30,000 words long! These are just a few of the fascinating facts to be found in this absorbing history of literary criticism. From the Ancient Greek period to the present day we learn about critics' lives, the times in which they lived and how the same problems of interpretation and valuation persist through the ages.