How to improve writing (no. 74)

From a New Yorker review of a memoir by Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Could we, terrible thought, have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out, on inspection, to be a complicated and qualified Yes. Certainly, no artist as hugely successful as he has been can have struck a chord without owning a piece of his time.

I’ve stared at these sentences to figure out why they bug me. The we is not as pompous as it might seem: the word refers to “American lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies.” But there’s the breathless “terrible thought,” the meaningless “on inspection,” the amplified “Yes,” and the final sentence, with its hype (“hugely successful”), awkward pun (“struck a chord”), and piled-up verbs (“has been can have struck”). I thought of a number of ways to revise that sentence:

An artist as successful as Lloyd Webber owns a piece of his time.

An artist as successful as Lloyd Webber is an integral part of his time.

An artist as successful as Lloyd Webber has made his mark on our time.

But I gave up, agreeing with Elaine that the sentence is nothing more than a truism: anyone who’s successful and famous is successful and famous. My revision:

Could we have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out to be a complicated and qualified yes.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 74 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]