The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.

We write in the language of Dryden and Addison, of Milton and Shakespeare, but the intellectual world we inhabit is that of Flaubert and Baudelaire; it is to t…

So wrote Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.