A. Alvarez is best known as a successful literary critic and poet and as a failed suicide. He has protested against the gentlemanly tradition in English letters: he derides its bland and superficial emotional response and has called for confrontation with the darker forces within ourselves and within society. Unusually for someone adopting this standpoint, his writing has always been lucid, spare and witty.

A psychologist who set out to discover what internal evil most worried the ordinary man found that people worry most about inner emptiness and their inability to match the exigencies of life with appropriately deep emotions. [Hunt] is the story of just such a man. Conrad's feelings have been blunted by his stale marriage, his tedious children, his monotonous office job and the obligatory blue jokes made by his colleagues in the pub: the greyness of his life is reflected in the grey light...