Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly, best known for The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise, was an essayist and parodist of genius, a literary journalist, editor of monthly magazine Horizon (1939-1950), book critic for the London Sunday Times from 1951, and nurturer of some of the finest writers of his time. The essays in this volume are selected from The Condemned Playground : Essays, 1927-1944 (1945), Ideas and Places (1953), and Previous Convictions (1963).

Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England, contributing regularly to The New Statesmen, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. His essays have been collected in book form and published to wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The Unquiet Grave is considered by many to be his most enduring work. It is a highly personal journal written during the devastation of World War II, filled with reflective passages that deal with aging, the break-up of a long term relationship, and the horrors of the war around him. It is also a wonderfully varied intellectual feast: a collection of aphorisms, epigrams, and quotations from such masters of European literature as Horace, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, and Goethe. Dazzlingly original in both form and content, The Unquiet Grave has continued to influence generations of writers.

A parody of James Bond. Originally published in the April 1963 issue of ‘London magazine’.

“Whom the gods wish to destroy,” writes Cyril Connolly, “they first call promising.” First published in 1938 and long out of print, Enemies of Promise, an “inquiry into the problem of how to write a book that lasts ten years,” tests the boundaries of criticism, journalism, and autobiography with the blistering prose that became Connolly’s trademark. Connolly here confronts the evils of domesticity, politics, drink, and advertising as well as novelists such as Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Faulkner in essays that remain fresh and penetrating to this day.

Ian Fleming conceived the idea for a series on the Seven Deadly Sins in the Sunday Times, and though it did not materialize for the paper, a book was published in 1962 that contained essays by some of England’s finest writers on their sin of choice. Ian Fleming wrote the foreword and declared that the traditional seven deadly sins—PRIDE, ENVY, ANGER, SLOTH [accidie], COVETOUSNESS, GLUTTONY and LUST—were no longer sufficient.Thereupon, he proposed seven deadlier sins worthier of a passport to Hell: SNOBBERY, MORAL COWARDICE, HYPOCRISY, CRUELTY, SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS, AVARICE & MALICE. This book takes a look at these vices as found in the novels of Ian Fleming.