High modernist …

… A CH Sisson Reader review – the last English modernist | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Sisson was a Tory; “a four-letter word”, as he puts it in the essay so titled, but his Toryism was one of “profound scepticism”. He came from a lower-middle-class background and knew when he was being condescended to by the Left, and, in his youth, by the likes of WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis in particular. “I could not help noticing that when they spoke of the workers it was as if they were speaking of people in some far-off fairyland or alternatively of a remote race of South Sea Islanders or of a favourite breed of beetles.”