Life & Letters | 13 December 2008

Flying to Athens on one of his last visits to Greece, Simon Gray started reading a novel by C. P. Snow, one of those old orange Penguins. After 50 pages he ‘still had no idea what the story was about’. It seemed foggy, ‘but an odd sort of fog, everything described so clearly, and yet everything obscured … he describes his world without seeing it, almost as if he thinks adjectives are in themselves full of detail and content.’