Yet reviewing is a skilled and multifaceted job It is one thing to be bright brisk and summarily fair in the six or eight hundred words of an ordinary newspaper review quite another to control without looseness of argument the six or eight thousand words sometimes allowed by international journals And the fifteen hundred words of a leading piece in the weekly magazines present some of the problems of both short and long Not that length is the only consideration For one thing the reviewer obviously needs to think about the probable audience the weekend skimmer at one end of the scale the person already interested enough in the subject to tackle a serious reviewarticle at the other Finally a reviewer needs to know quite a bit about quite a number of things and must be able to write prose that intelligent people can understand and enjoy It follows almost infallibly that the reviewer will be somebody who writes other things besides reviews