Straw was laid in the streets outside Chiltern Court, to deaden sounds, while Arnold Bennett lay dying in his flat there. It was the last time the city of London was to pay such respect to a public figure. To some extent this respect was nostalgic because by 1931 Bennett's reputation was already considerably frayed. He had been too successful; he had written too much. His short stories and his journalism were appearing in magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic; his novels The Old Wives Tale (1908) and the Clayhanger trilogy--Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1915)--were considered to be masterpieces; Riceyman Steps came close to being a best-seller and in 1924 won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction published in 1923. His book reviews, which appeared each Thursday in the London Evening Standard, were so influential that he was at his death far and away...