Cyril Connolly: A Life

Astonishingly precocious in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for the rest of his life by an acute sense of failure and romantic yearning. His two greatest books, The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise, are classics of English prose, combining wit, romanticism, and merciless self-knowledge. He was an essayist and parodist of genius, a superb literary journalist, and nurturer of some of the finest writers of his time. Jeremy Lewis is the ideal biographer of Connolly—sympathetic to his doubts and failings, celebratory of his achievements, and delighted by his humor. This book is an illuminating portrait of the man and the literary era in which he played such a key role.