Who are the best prose writers in English?

A friend of mine and I have just exchanged these mails. He wrote first.

Sat at home, sombre, listening to St Matthew's Passion. Thought some more about the best prose writers I can think of. 
Amis - Kingsley and Martin. Martin brilliant, complex, sometimes convoluted. Kingsley polished. 
Waugh - often brilliant and economical writing. 
Hitchens - very consistent, punchy, funny. His brother also good. 
Rana Dasgupta - superb long form journalist, wrote a brilliant essay on the ills of modern Delhi 
Jonathan Sumption - his books on 100 years war are exquisite although he sometimes meticulous to the point of dull. 
Russell Brand - ignore his Revolution twaddle. His autobiography is one of the funniest books I've read and he sets the scenes of his misdemeanours superbly. 
Kenneth Tynan - brilliant, funny, uninhibited.

My reply:

I forget it's Holy Week. Of course I should have listened to the Bach Passions. It doesn’t help that everyone here thinks Easter is in ten days’ time.

I would rate Jeremy Taylor very high but I brought Holy Living with me when I came here in 1998 and only dipped into it. The King James Bible is better if that counts. Robert Burton is fun.  I never quite went loopy about Sir Thomas Browne but he is good - all the early 17th century writers wrote great prose. And I love of course John Aubrey's unfinished Brief Lives that had he finished it would have lost much of its charm.

I must read Coleridge's prose. I am atrociously badly read in some areas. But without ANY doubt my favourite prose writer is Macaulay. I haven’t read Ruskin. Not much Newman or Carlyle. 

Of the 20th century I love Harold Nicolson’s diary, my favourite diarist (along with Macaulay). Sybille Bedford is wonderful. I like Belloc’s essays and The Path to Rome though not his novels. I like Eliot’s prose better than his poetry, much better. Churchill was very good. I also love William Dalrymple. Yes, I love Tynan very much. And Hitchens wrote great polemic – although I only read a 2 or 3 of his pieces.  This in particular sticks in my mind as great prose. 

I love Macaulay’s letters enormously, my favourite letter writer. Also Lady
Diana Cooper's letters, in her autobiographies and in Philip Ziegler's biography. I love The Faber Book of Diaries. Not a fan of Pepys unlike my beloved Dad, but Pepys is more fun than Evelyn.

My favourite sentence in English is by Landor. Quoted in '84, Charing Cross Rd', that enchanting play, then book and then film.

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave : there are no voices, O Rhodope ! that are not soon mute, however tuneful : there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.

Oh and I almost forgot perhaps the best prose writer of the 20th century was Raymond Chandler. I love Evelyn Waugh very much and rate him higher than Graham Greene but as a prose stylist I prefer Graham Greene. Greene's book reviews are wonderfully written as are Philip Larkin's.

Here is the best thing Macaulay ever wrote.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.

I blogged about the best opening lines of books here but actually I think the opening lines of Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul might be best of all. 

Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of sunset like a stripe on a national flag. Doctor Plarr found himself alone at that hour except for the one sailor who was on guard outside the maritime building. It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognized plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.