Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of "Horizon" by Michael Shelden
This excellent piece of literary history takes as its subject the activities of Connolly and his associates during the years 1939-49, when he edited Horizon, a monthly magazine devoted to the arts. What with the before and after, it is also, in effect, a life of Connolly, and a very good one too. The Author has miraculously captured the mandarin and Byzantine nature of both his protagonist and of the magazine, the most important in the London of its time. His attitude to its volatile, sensitive and brilliant editor is one of complete empathy, his portrait of the man quite possibly the best there now is outside of his own work.