In these circumstances, I discovered Encounter, and its effect was exhilarating. I had never before heard the political and cultural case for the West argued with such assurance, style and intellectual force. This was not surprising because for at least twenty years no one else had heard it either—the initiative had been entirely with the Left. What celebration there had been of the West—mostly during the war—had been left in the inadequate hands of the likes of Sir Arthur Bryant. Otherwise, all had been denigration, or at best gloom, of the sort expressed by Cyril Connolly in his notorious sentence, declaring that it was “closing time in the gardens of the West”.