Couldn't figure just why I found this an "interesting" read in a "difficult" kind of way. Then I discovered these two proper critics:
Extracts from: Richard Poirier · Peter Conrad’s Flight from Precision · LRB 17 July 1980

Wherever you turn in this book Conrad sounds brisk, assured, giddy in his confident marshalling of terms, patterns, brisk, assured and misleading. He is anxious always to be dazzling, outrageous, ‘brilliant’ in adducing connections. The sentences move with a metronomic regularity never deflected by recalcitrant textual or historical evidence, and lest we choose to look at any of the works from which he takes his many quotations, he is careful not to supply page references, bibliography or even the exact date of letters………

If anyone can make mistakes, then by the same token anyone, even accidentally, ought to get things right more often than Conrad does. There are so many errors and misinterpretations tumbling over one another that it becomes impossible to trust anything he says…..

….Conrad can only hold together his dreary and flat-minded schematisations if the writings he uses are made inert, deprived of the modulations of humour, which is no mean accomplishment when the roster includes Dickens and Lawrence, Oscar Wilde and Auden. Conrad is particularly severe about the last two and also about Rupert Brooke…..

And finally!:

To whom can the blundering and blustering juvenility of this performance be addressed? Not to anyone who knows anything, and not, God forbid, to anyone who doesn’t…..
……………………………….ooo…………………………….

See also another highly critical piece in The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick NYRB 2017:
English Visitors in America pp 306-322. Can’t find a link but here’s an example of Hardwick's review:
Extraction of Conrad’s thought is outstandingly difficult. Nearly every sentence is a thorn of perplexity. First, there is his saturation in the texts, an absorbing so thorough that the texts have little lfe outside his own mind; they are expropriated…….

………………………………..oOo……………………………. ( )