In The Road to Little Dribbling, Bill Bryson often allows himself to digress from pure travelogue. In one instance he posits questions to detect whether you are on the brink of becoming “dangerously stupid”; in another he says it is reasonable for us all to have about a dozen “reflex loathings”, in other words dislikes that need no justification. His include “tasting menus” and “the parents of any child named Tarquin”. The most heartfelt, however, is “Most book reviewers, but particularly at the moment Douglas Brinkley, a minor American academic and sometime critic whose powers of observation and generosity of spirit would fit comfortably into a proton and still leave room for an echo.”

It’s a not so generous swipe at an adversary who savaged Bryson’s book, One Summer. Brinkley’s critique in the Washington Post left the realms of admissable complaint and entered a zone perilously close to the courtroom. In his stinging retort, also in the Washington Post, Bryson concluded: “he will become a better reviewer when he can distinguish between criticism and insult.” As put-downs go it was restrained. But as Brinkley’s appearance in Little Dribbling suggests, the sore still weeps.

Vengeance is Bryson’s, you might think, having named and shamed the miscreant in a work likely to be read by legions. Had I been his editor, though, I would have recommended he desist from settling a score in this petty way, and instead rise above it. Or at least appear to. Brinkley’s review was expressly designed to offend and upset, and thus shares with all hatchet jobs a smug and sarcastic tone that tells readers as much about the reviewer as the work they are trashing.

You can always tell when a critic is galled beyond reason. I’ve been there myself, when a book’s failings have so inflamed me that not even the words ‘the’ and ‘a’ are acceptable. But such occasions are rare. Indeed, I am struck by the lengths to which reviewers go to be fair, or even fulsome. To read weekend reviews, you would think that Virginia Woolf and Saul Bellow walked again, given the praise heaped upon titles that are mediocre at best.

You would never guess from Bryson’s remarks that he has been extraordinarily well treated by the critical community over the years. Nor that it is entirely possible for a reviewer to choose whether to praise a book or bury it, both options usually available, and justifiable.

In a lifetime’s reviewing I have read only a handful of truly superb works, predominantly fiction or poetry. Whether they will endure I do not know, though they certainly deserve to. But most books are as speckled as eggs - flawed to a lesser or greater extent. That even these imperfect specimens can still charm or beguile says as much about the capacious appetite and tolerance of the reading public as about the qualities of the work itself.

Certainly, the best conversations I have about literature are with friends who could no more get through 24 hours without reading than without sleep, sometimes trading one for the other, in a book’s favour. The fact that so many works are imperfect is not exactly irrelevant, but it is an accepted part of the literary life-cycle. Equal time is spent discussing the writing’s blind spots as in reliving its thrills, and therein lies one of the great joys of criticising. It would be terrible to be faced constantly with material of canonical quality. What would be the point?

This, I suspect, explains the reviewer’s willingness to offer the benefit of the doubt. Perfection is almost impossible, especially in creative writing. We do not expect it, and sometimes when we find it, we do not immediately recognise it. But an author’s misjudgements, so long as not disfiguring, are part of what makes their voice distinctive.

Of course, the risk of being floored by a bad review is the writer’s great fear, understandably so. But that it is relatively uncommon surely suggests ours is an essentially kindly trade. The fact that someone as lauded and experienced as Bryson is still fulminating about one vile review, however, says much about the human condition and its tendency to dwell on the negative. He would have done well to heed Kingsley Amis’s advice: a bad review should ruin your breakfast, but not your lunch.