He was a novelist who never wrote a satisfactory novel, a literary critic who never bothered to learn his trade properly, a social historian whose history was full of gaps. Yet he matters. For as polemic his work is never anything less than magnificent; and the virtues which the polemic kind demands—urgency, incisiveness, clarity and humour—he possessed in exactly the right combination.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "He was a novelist who never wrote a satisfactory novel, a literary critic who never bothered to learn his trade properly, a social historian whose history was full of gaps. Yet he matters. For as polemic his work is never anything less than magnificent; and the virtues which the polemic kind demands—urgency, incisiveness, clarity and humour—he possessed in exactly the right combination." in the context of "John Wain, Essays on Literature and Ideas (1963), p. 181" to mean that wisdom is timeless.