The Evening Colonnade, published in 1973, is a collection of essays and reviews by the English writer and critic Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise , which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of...

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The compilation consists primarily of Connolly's articles written when he was literary critic for the Sunday Times. Other articles are taken from Harpers & Queen, the London Magazine

London Magazine

The London Magazine is a historied publication of arts, literature and miscellaneous interests. Its history ranges nearly three centuries and several reincarnations, publishing the likes of William Wordsworth, William S...

, Art News, Art and Literature and The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

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The work is divided into four sections as follows:

• "Dew on the Garlic Leaf" contains mainly essays of personal experience, starting with a continuaton of the autobiographical element of Enemies of Promise
  Enemies of Promise
  Enemies of Promise is a critical and autobiographical work written by Cyril Connolly and first published in 1938.It comprises three parts, the first dedicated to Connolly's observations about literature and the literary world of his time, the second a listing of adverse elements that affect the...
  
  
• "Divers of Worship" comprises mainly reviews of works associated with past writers
• "Nothing if not Critical" includes reviews of contemporary writers of the modern movement
• "The House of Two Doors" consists of articles about topics other than writers

Connolly derived the title from Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

's poem on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

"What are the gay parterre, the chequer'd shade

The morning bower, the ev'ning colonnade

But soft recesses of uneasy minds

To sigh unheard in, to the passing winds?"

He also had in mind the surrealist work of Chirico.