The Morning Watch [antikvár]

PREFACE by Alan Pryce-Jones Men of letters are seldom attractive human beings. I remember once being rebuked by Somerset Maugham for some small act of consideration. It was a more or less humorous rebuke, but it contained the stern warning that the better the word "nice" applied to a writer the less good he was likely to be in his art. From time to time, however, there emerges a writer whose "niceness" is balanced by a touch of the intolerable. Everybody loves him; he distills an irresistible attraction; he also maddens. Shelley is an obvious case, and, in quite recent vu