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“... his affair with Lys (while still married to Jean and while Lys was still married to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over ...”

“... This, say Barbara Skelton’s publishers, is the ‘second – and some people will be relieved to hear, final – volume of her riotous autobiography’. On page one of volume one there is a quotation from Harriette Wilson about the meaning of the term ‘gentleman’ – a subject not really very close to Skelton’s heart ...”

“... You must explain to me why Cyril wants Barbara,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming in September 1955, a year after Barbara Skelton’s marriage to Cyril Connolly had formally ended. ‘It’s not as though she were rich or a good housekeeper or the mother of his children ...”

“... and worth six of Quennell.’ It was Peter Quennell who had christened Connolly’s next wife, Barbara Skelton, ‘Baby’, although as Clive Fisher not inaptly puts it, ‘it was hard to imagine she had ever been pink and predictable and defenceless.’ No doubt the Furies were christened ‘the Kindly Ones’ in the same spirit. Her activities ...”

“... Then he made a pass at Eyre. He took on tougher opposition with Number Six, the ferocious minx Barbara Skelton, part-original of the lethal Pamela Flitton in A Dance to the Music of Time. She had already scored with a whole bestiary of sacred monsters. Jackson would boast that ‘after King Farouk, Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld, I was the ...”

“... it would attract few readers today, the book had something genuinely winning and intime about it. Barbara Pym’s journal records her love of it, as of the books of Denton Welch, another colourful figure from Horizon and the Connolly epoch. That common Mauritanian lobster, apparent survivor from the days of Gérard de Nerval and the dandies of Paris, touched ...”

“... world and the people in it, and it is surely from that place in her that she writes. According to Barbara Skelton, ‘on hearing of someone’s ghastly misfortune,’ Blackwood ‘would double up laughing’. She maintains the coldest eye she can manage, shying away from sentimentality as if it were death itself. Death, indeed, seems to be ...”

“... he goes by the nickname The Papal Bun). There is also a hint, or at least a non-denial, that Barbara Skelton was the model for Pamela Widmerpool, the unforgettably nasty, semi-necrophile nymphomaniac who is one of the sequence’s great triumphs. These might not sound like high-level insights, and perhaps they aren’t: it would be silly to pretend ...”

“... things were best said by not being said at all. Plante, however, is a throwback to the days of Barbara Skelton and the Comtesse de Boigne. In the years covered by his diary, he seems to have had an ear permanently cocked. Or was it his leg? Or was it his cock? Whichever, he was alert to the possibility that somebody close at hand might be about to ...”

“... him, or at least never set about him, remains a mystery. Connolly, unaware that he was sharing Barbara Skelton with Koestler, wrote: Like everyone who talks of ethics all day long, one could not trust him half an hour with one’s wife, one’s best friend, one’s manuscripts or one’s wine merchant – he’d lose them all. He burns with the ...”

“... written by monks for monks. Similarly, to call medieval poems like ‘Adam lay y-bounden’ and Skelton’s ‘Merry Margaret’ light is to seem to suggest that this all-too-sophisticated, even decadent culture must be, because distant, something like quaint – that Merry Margaret lived in Merrie England. And if this is true of ...”

“... Torregiano was sculpting Henry VII for Westminster Abbey. But, though there were notable writers (Skelton, Wyatt, More, the great translators of the Bible like Tyndale), the country’s literary culture was relatively thin: it lacked character and cohesion. By the end of the 16th century, the picture had reversed. The great architectural and sculptural ...”