A recent commentary in The New Criterion attacks The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature for a slew of errors and omissions. The essay decries the “self-described ‘authoritative narrative'” for being too focused on contemporary literary criticism, too expensive, and flawed beyond usefulness. Among the most glaring oversights to make it in the book is an inaccurate index, which commonly misspells author names and confuses references, making T. E. Hulme into “T. H. Hulme” and attributing E.P. Thompson‘s The Making of the English Working Class to a “Denys Thompson”. The essay asks why environmentalists don’t protest “a major university press whose activities darken hundreds of acres of wood pulp for no good reason?” The volume also excludes such literary luminaries as P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Masefield, and Anthony Burgess, among many others. The essays concludes that the new work of literary history “describes a parallel universe, one that exists alongside, but without ever touching, the real universe of literary and cultural experience. It is a universe fraught with perfervid political imaginings, inspissated prose, and baseless scenarios of grievance and exploitation. It is a sad, impoverished country that is charted in its pages, far, far removed from the actual workings of literature.”