His only stylistic vice is his constant apologising, for which, in the first sentence of the book, he apologises. Quite unnecessarily: it is verbal Vivaldi, gurgling and burbling deliciously along in its perfect cadences, its occasional unexpected harmonies, its calculated quirks, ever and anon modulating into a more tender, more reflective passage, hinting at, but never too deeply exploring, emotional depths, before speeding off into a joyous allegro vivace of infectious comic bravura. Early on, he even disparages his literary style. There is nothing that anyone could say about him, or his book, that he does not say, and say more cruelly, of it and himself, in its pages. So clever is he - and he is the cleverest by a mile of all my contemporaries - that he has written a book which reviews itself. One word is conspicuously absent from the catalogue of Cs: cleverness. E ach section of this cunningly constructed causerie of a second autobiographical volume is headed with a word or words starting with the letter C.
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