William Empson Was A Genius | John Gray | New Statesman | 28th June 2016

Famed as a critic and a poet, William Empson shambled through life with “a weird, sordid nobility”. When scandal drove him from Cambridge, he taught in China. He wrote his “lost masterpiece”, The Face of the Buddha, about Buddhist art, while wandering through Asia in the 1930s. The manuscript, which vanished one drunken night in Soho, has surfaced 60 years later. We may hesitate now to talk of genius, but “it is hard to know how else to describe Empson’s astonishing originality of mind”