Evening Post, 5 Jan 2006

On Literature Umberto Eco, Vintage, £8.99

In his day job, the author of The Name of the Rose is a professor of semiotics. This collection of criticism is far from the thicket that would lead you to expect, but neither is it as much fun as his other writing might lead you to hope. His favoured writers are Dante, Joyce, and Borges; his favoured tone is the kind of heavy academic twinkliness you find in ceremonial lectures — which, indeed, many of these pieces once were.