When James Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, was published in 1999, the reviewers hailed a master critic.

The common thread in Wood's latest collection of essays is what makes us laugh - and the book is an attempt to distinguish between the perhaps rather limited English comedy (as seen in Waugh, for example) and a ''continental'' tragic-comedy, which he sees as real, universal and quixotic.

A particularly acerbic, and very funny, essay - which has been widely celebrated - deals with Zadie Smith, Rushdie, Pynchon and DeLillo; its title, ''Hysterical Realism'', has already entered the phrasebook of literary language.

With its brilliant studies of Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Naipaul, Pritchett and Bellow, The Irresponsible Self offers more exhilarating despatches from one of our finest living critics.