Rebecca West, for all her faults, was my first pantheon writer, someone whose prose could grab you by the ignorance and dazzle you with sweeping historical narratives, grand in their sweep yet precise with insight. Every few pages I was rocked back on my heels anew and left in awe at her sheer intellectual prowess, the simple brilliance of her explication, the awful consistency of history rhyming worse than it could ever repeat. The savagery with which she described her villains, the historical figures by turns genius, cruel, stupid, and every other human permutation wrought tragic by the bloody arc of imperial conquest, exploitation, and mismanagement, was something to behold. Despite her Manichean worldview, imbalanced ethnic stereotypes, and almost hilariously non sequitur gendered/homophobic hot takes, her writing is everything I aspire to.