BEGINNING HIS CAREER at Oxford in the 1950s, the ever-incisive John Bayley has been one of the great bulwarks--in the tradition of William Hazlitt and Edmund Wilson--of twentieth-century world literature, and his distinctive sensibility has reshaped tastes and theories more than was previously realized. Here, in "The Power of Delight, a volume that has been assembled with the assistance of "The New Yorker editor Leo Carey, we see at last the full range of Bayley's life and work, divided into eight sections that include "English Literature," "Russian Novels," and "American Poetry." A wide-ranging guide to essential reading, "The Power of Delight examines classics, neglected gems, and masterpieces of our time--from Jane Austen to Milan Kundera, Leo Tolstoy to John Ashbery, and from Robert Lowell's messy persona to George Orwell's self-canonization.