Life and letters | 28 July 2012

With few exceptions, literary journalists moulder in the grave and are soon forgotten. They may get some sort of posthumous life if they are made the subject of other books. John Gross rescued a few from oblivion in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Otherwise it is usually only those who were also poets, novelists or social commentators such as Matthew Arnold, who are not soon forgotten. When I was young, the Sunday papers were dominated by Connolly, Mortimer, Toynbee, Nicolson and Davenport. I delighted in them all, and equally in V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman. All of course were excoriated by F. R. Leavis in stern puritanical Cambridge. Fair enough: to academics engaged in ‘close reading’ or, later, in ‘theory’, the literary journalist has always been a flâneur or dilettante. Nevertheless, all those I have mentioned wrote well, and were influential in their day.