In a discussion of his role as a critic, Daniel Mendelsohn attributes his unsentimental judgments of books to his training as a classicist:
I was once doing an event and somebody asked, "When you write reviews do you think of the feelings of the writer?" I said that I was trained to think of the writer as having been dead for two thousand years. It’s actually very good because then you focus on the work. You don’t want to be cruel or snarky but to take the work seriously. So that long view is an echo or inheritance from the way I was trained to read things.
The Dish 