Books: Pleasurable Dexterity

THE CONDEMNED PLAYGROUND (287 pp.) —Cyril Connolly—Macmillan ($2.75).

A critic, aphorist and editor of parts, Cyril Connolly is the latest fashion in bitter elegance in English letters, as his friend George Orwell is the latest fashion in common sense. Connolly's touch of Irish divination and curiosity has given him a greater range than other amateurs of the 18th Century manner. His published pieces yield the vivid image of an Old Etonian still alive and kicking amid the European rubble, somberly turning the pages of psychiatric journals, reaching for the odes of Horace, and composing, with a groan, clever paragraphs to keep his...