A few months hence we shall be observing the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Horizon, the literary monthly which Cyril Connolly founded in London in the early months of the Second World War. We shall also be observing the fortieth anniversary of the magazine’s demise. Calling itself “A Review of Literature & Art,” Horizon was published for exactly a decade—and what a decade it was! The first issue went to press barely three months after Britain, still a world power but woefully ill-prepared to fight a major war, found itself locked in lonely combat against the Nazis, who were very shortly in control of most of Europe. The last issue, with its unforgettable dirge—“. . . it is closing time in the gardens of the West,” etc.—emerged from a weaker and even bleaker, now “socialist” England, which was so impoverished and dispirited that it looked more and more like a casualty of the war in which it had been victorious. Through the darkest days of the Blitz and the V-l(“doodle bug”) bombings, with British losses steadily mounting abroad and what remained of cultural life—the life of the mind—under attack at home from the philistine press as frivolous and escapist, Connolly went right on producing, month after month, an unabashedly highbrow literary journal of extraordinary quality and vivacity. It was an amazing feat, and all the more amazing because Connolly had already pronounced himself a failure—“a lazy, irresolute person, overvain and over-modest, unsure in my judgments and unable