THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS by Angus...

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS by Angus Wilson, Edith Sitwell, Cyril Connolly, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Sykes and W. H. Auden (Quill/William Morrow: $8., illustrated). Before Ian Fleming abandoned journalism for James Bond novels, he worked as an editor at the London Sunday Times, where he conceived a plan to have some of Britain’s most distinguished authors discuss the sins Thomas Aquinas called deadly-- Envy, Pride, Sloth, Covetousness, Gluttony, Lust and Anger. This sprightly collection of essays offers entertaining and thought-provoking reading, 30 years after its initial publication. W.H. Auden observes that “Anger, even when it is sinful, has has one virtue; it overcomes Sloth,” while Christopher Sykes asks why Lust should be considered more sinful than “hypocrisy, hardness of heart and the parade of ‘respectability’ by the spiritually vain.” However, in her pretentious, name-dropping essay on Pride, Dame Edith Sitwell commits what Fleming calls in the foreword “that deadliest of all sins . . . being a Bore.”