VOLUME I: THE MODERN MOVEMENT
VOLUME TWO: THE TWO NATURES
with a foreword by William Boyd
As a formula for failure, the first line of Cyril Connolly’s once famous ‘word cycle’, The Unquiet Grave, is unsurpassable:
Engrave that over the lintel of any writer’s study and you’ll have put an end to the whole business, since what else is this craft of words but a fool’s attempt to trap a flickering intuition of the world between a capital letter and a full stop? No doubt lofty purposes can sometimes, very few times, be achieved: one thinks of Milton wanting ‘to be milked’ of a worthy subject, or Dante convinced that ‘Minerva blows the sails and Apollo leads me’. But in most cases a fickle bunch of readers distributes the prizes and doesn’t give a hoot for either the writer’s good intentions or literature’s true function.The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
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