Cyril Connolly, who attended Eaton with George Orwell and Oxford with Evelyn Waugh, spent his youth among the masters of the modern movement -- Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Gide, Huxley, Hemingway -- developing a literary sensibility that would lead him to found Horizon (for years the foremost literary magazine in England) and serve him well as chief among English reviewers for three decades. The Evening Colonnade is a collection of criticism dedicated to life, from a man whose life was dedicated to love and appreciation of the best. Whether writing on Ezra Pound's silence, the decay of Venice, Baudelaire's Paris, Scott Fitzgerald dining with Edith Wharton, the nineties, the twenties of his school days, Voltaire, Mailer, Jung, Africa, or English country homes, Connolly's prose exemplifies a style that the American Academy celebrated as "warmly observant of everything human, with aphoristic elegance and kaleidoscopic profundity."
