The critic James Wood is part of the British literary invasion that brought us that verbal adept, the late Christopher Hitchens, and glam editors such as Tina Brown. So it seems fitting that Wood should launch his latest essay collection with a salute to a member of that other British invasion, the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon.

In “The Fun Stuff,” he compares Moon’s playing to “an ideal sentence of prose, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to: a long passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong.”