English critic, novelist, and man of letters, founder and editor of Horizon, a magazine of contemporary literature that was a major influence in Britain in its time (1939–50). As a critic he was personal and eclectic rather than systematic, but his idiosyncratic views were perceptive and conveyed with wit and grace.

The son of an army major, he was educated at Eton College and then at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1927 he began a career of literary journalism as a contributor to the New Statesman, The Sunday Times, Observer, and other periodicals. His only novel, The Rock Pool, about the headlong decline of a young Englishman in a Riviera art colony, appeared in 1936. His most noted books are his collections of essays, Enemies of Promise (1938), which contains an autobiographical section, and The Condemned Playground (1945); and an assemblage of introspective jottings, The Unquiet Grave (1944). Previous Convictions: Selected Writings of a Decade was published in 1963, and The Evening Colonnade, a collection of essays, in 1975.