Precociously brilliant in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romantic yearning to recover a lost Eden. His two great books, THE UNQUIET GRAVE and ENEMIES OF PROMISE, are classics of English prose, combining wit, romanticism and merciless self-knowledge. He was an essayist and parodist of genius, a superb literary journalist, and as editor of HORIZON nurtured some of the finest writers of his time, yet his own genius was essentially autobiographical, and even his book reviews were permeated with his personlity. As witty in person as he was in his prose, he was notoriously slothful and greedy; he was married three times, and his dealings with women were bedevilled by a lifelong tendency to be in love with two or more people at once. Jeremy Lewis, Connolly's authorised biographer, has had access to -and quotes extensively from - previously unpublished letters, diaries articles and stories, and has spoken to many of those who knew and loved his subject. Lewis is the perfect biographer of Connolly, sympathetic towards his doubts and failings, justly celebratory of his achievements, revelling in his humour and love of gossip. His book will be the definitive life, not only a marvellous portrait of the man but of his circle of and of an era in the literary life of