Enemies of Promise - Cyril Connolly

The first half of this book, about how to create literature that will last, was good, crisp, smoothly argued stuff -- with occasional patches of bad "fine writing" -- that made a useful distinction between the Mandarin and the Journalistic schools of Eng Lit: the former (in general) being Woolf, Pater, Firbank; latter, Orwell, Maugham, Forster. Each has its pros and cons: Connolly claims that the Journalistic school is too homogeneous, and illustrates the point by conflating extracts from Orwell, Isherwood, and Hemmingway. I don't think the point is made very successfully. I've never read Hemmingway, but from what I've seen any comparison between ...