At one stage of his life Mr Spender took to painting and, he naively tells us, then learned the great lesson that 'it is possible entirely to lack talent in an art where one believes oneself to have creative feeling.' It is odd that this never occurred to him while he was writing, for to see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.