‘When everyone appears to be of one accord in thinking the right thing, go the other way.’ This was, broadly speaking, the maxim by which J.C. wrote his weekly N.B. column for the Times Literary Supplement, after inheriting it from David Sexton in 1997. Tonally different to the rest of the paper, N.B. under J.C. became a place where a contrary spirit found its expression in a series of ongoing, in-joking set pieces. From updates on the latest grammatical or linguistic dicta in the (mythical) TLS Reviewer’s Handbook, ‘perambulations’ among bookshops in search of forgotten or out-of-print works, and a set of satirical prizes, such as the Jean Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal, the column was a friend as well as ‘a dependant’ for its author.

The aim was miscellany, as James Campbell, the unmasked pen behind the J.C. persona, points out in his engaging and (naturally) scrupulous introduction (no doubt due to all that exposure to the TLS Reviewer’s Handbook). What’s collected here amounts to about a twelfth of the 15 million words produced during J.C.’s stint, and provides a mixture of the familiar and long-running with the freshly noticed. Literary scandals, exasperating academic jargon and shameless back-scratching were all ripe for the N.B. treatment. But it was never a gossip column, not least because ‘I rarely attended literary lunches and went to few book launch parties’.

Campbell is funny on the complaints his column provoked, which latterly became known by the letters’ page editor as ‘Poor J.C.’; and while his duty was firstly to entertain, he took on certain other tasks with diligence – a humorous note never erasing the serious purpose of the barbs administered in defence of clear English usage or against hypocrisy and the creeping segregations of identity politics, an especial feature in the last years of his tenure.

J.C. wouldn’t have been embraced as he was by readers if his had been only a disciplinarian stance. There are several touching, deeply felt pieces here, including an obituary of a former TLS colleague, the poet Mick Imlah, a masterclass in sturdy restraint: ‘To say that we miss the sight of him curling his forelock while deep in a piece of writing or editing is to make an inadequate gesture in the direction of his absence.’

He was also clearly having a good time. This comes across when re-reading descriptions of the bookshop excursions and other literary pilgrimages, memories of visits to Patrick Leigh Fermor or the graveyard behind Gray’s ‘Elegy’; but it is also expressed by Campbell’s potted history of the paper, and the way in which he came to join its staff. ‘Why not say it straight?’ he writes. ‘It was a great job.’

The J.C. persona was a useful foil, enabling Campbell to embrace that spirit of going against the grain at a time when ‘you can’t say that’ was becoming a common refrain. His targets for jocular deflation were various, from pointing out that the Women’s Prize for Fiction might be an exclusionary, rather than ennobling, project, or that in the case of Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing, ‘each could be replaced with its opposite, and still be reasonable advice’.

One of J.C.’s ongoing tropes was his ‘poor school education’; but, once again, there was method to this seeming self-deprecation, linked to the regular discussions of linguistic precision and a defence of ‘whom’, pointing out that the Harvard- and Yale-educated writers cocking a snook at ‘grammar Nazis’ ‘can all use who when whom would be strictly correct, because they have knowledge’. What becomes clear is that, above all else, J.C. was on the side of his readers, trying to save them from being condescended to or taken in by the latest stitch-up from a prize committee, and standing up for elitism, high standards and scrutiny in a self-serving sea of industry-wide laissez-faire.

A stirring moment comes with J.C. pointing out that once it was the oppressive authorities who banned books, not the so-called radicals, and drafting in a story of W.H. Auden’s threat to leave Random House over their ‘no-platforming’ of Ezra Pound, whose poems ‘I do not care for… myself particularly’ to reinforce his point. On the notion that the reason for the bohemian Village Voice closing was that ‘we won’, in 2018, J.C. ponders the nature of this apparent cultural ‘victory’: ‘debasement of political discourse, online shaming and scapegoating, Twitter mobs, campus no-platforming, cultural appropriation, the negation of critical judgment by identity politics, censorship of incorrect ideas’.

Serious points wittily made, the book ends up being not only a rewarding medley of the sublime and ridiculous from two decades of literary life but a reminder that contrariness and a resolve not to take things too seriously within a pious, increasingly puritanical culture, is far from a frivolous position to occupy.