At a party more than a decade ago, the late literary essayist Lorna Sage once remarked to me of Philip French, film critic of The Observer newspaper since 1978, that his great gift - and curse - is that he cannot forget. Reading this first collection of a planned three volumes of French's writings on film and literature - this one dedicated to short essays on film - bears out the better half of Sage's fond suggestion. French's easy grasp of what seems like all of film history's most useful facts, quotes and anecdotes in their most concise form is immediate, and enviably impressive. You could call him the nabob of the nugget, were that too trivial a title for such a formidable critic and journalist.

For instance, in this volume you can learn who invented the term 'kitchen sink school', at whose dinner table the London Film Festival was conceived,which film critic wrote the screenplays of Goldfinger and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, who was spying for whom during the Cold War in Hollywood - and that Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis, was inspired to do so by a screening of Leslie Howard's splendid piece of British propaganda Pimpernel Smith. The fact that French is a one-man archive should be added to this list of polished and fascinating pieces of infotainment.

French is equally a master of the confident summary sentence. 'Strictly speaking', he avers, 'America is not the subject of any movie Chaplin ever made, only the setting. You feel you're in safe hands with every succinct statement. His writing is as crisp as fresh celery, as sharp as newly cut paper. A typical French essay will begin by finding an unusual connection between disparate facts or events. His essay on 'The Cold War and the American Cinema', for instance, begins with the coincidence that the town of Fulton, Mississippi was both the locale for Winston Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech and the model for 'the nasty Midwestern community' in the film King's Row, the 1942 vehicle for actor and future Cold War warrior Ronald Reagan. Having laid out the background of the McCarthyite era most vividly, French will then offer the key questions - in this case, 'Why did Hollywood capitulate so readily to HUAC?' and 'What was HUAC so determinedly after?' - and answer them with careful acuity.

To read Philip French, therefore, is to read the best-informed and most superbly schooled of liberal-minded working British newspaper critics. French's pre-eminence for me is that he is the best of those whose criticism sits on the bedrock of principled journalism. But to say this still feels like a limitation. French's interests range widely across the arts and politics, and he has a particular fondness for poetry that may be the secret ingredient in his vivid clarity as a writer.

As someone who writes regularly on the state of British cinema, I was most intrigued by the 1966 essay for this magazine, 'The Alphaville of Admass', in which he attacks the 'swinging London' likes of Darling, Morgan and Alfie. Though the argument is effective, I couldn't help feeling there was a touch of envy to it - that here was a member of the National Service generation who had just missed the party and thought these films' directors, being 'down with the kids', were grotesque. I cite it only to demonstrate that French is a figure from a moral age rather admirably different from today's. His short essays here - whether on neglected film geniuses like Victor Fleming, the great Japanese double act Kurosawa and Mifune, or cinematic versions of the great metropolis New York - are all gems. It is a miracle of endurance that he's still a major weekly reviewer of the highest quality.