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“... Joan Wyndham began her diary on the brink of her deflowering and of the deflowering of Europe – the latter being a far less engrossing subject to this sexy, self-centred girl. The value of her diary lies in its artlessness. Here is femme moyenne sensuelle, unashamed, with nothing very noble or sensitive to commend her ...”

“... the lessons at the local Episcopalian church. This is, in the long run, a comforting sort of book. Joan Wyndham, too, has passed 70. She saw it coming. 11 October 1990. My 69th birthday. Old age – how I hate it ... My head has started to poke forward like a turtle peering from its shell, my front teeth fall out when I sneeze ... How is it possible to ...”

“... and difficulty would be all – the real lyricism of the thing can only flower on the page. Joan Wyndham, on the other hand, another diarist and contemporary of Pym who conveys the same inimitable sense of being a silly girl, or rather of wanting to be a silly girl, as the diary self, also likes to note the solid satisfactions of sex, how it took ...”

“... had the French edition of White Mischief, which I come into. He’d put originally that Francis Wyndham, one of the senior editors, wanted Cyril Connolly to write something, and I immediately looked myself up and it said: ‘Francis Wyndham, un des rédacteurs les plus âgés’, as if I was one of the oldest editors ...”

“... I first met Francis Wyndham in 1968, when I went to the Sunday Times Magazine looking for a job. A thunderstorm in the Gray’s Inn Road had soaked my cheap lightweight blue suit, bought in Johannesburg, and I was thinking my appearance had cost me my chance. At that time everyone – writers and photographers – seemed to want to write for the Magazine, then under the editorship of Godfrey Smith ...”

“... his chief contribution is ‘to argue for the stylistic influence of the early Vorticist prose of Wyndham Lewis on key texts of Joyce, Pound and Eliot and to reaffirm Lewis’s important role within the Modernist venture’. However, his study of these texts has led him to the ‘distinctly unconventional hypothesis’ that they should be considered ‘less ...”

“... the Duchess of Windsor had changed historical events more drastically than Mary Queen of Scots, or Joan of Arc, or even Margaret Thatcher, then perhaps Caroline Blackwood’s recycled revelations about the Duchess – her expertise at fellatio, her 22 carat gold bath-tub at Cap d’Antibes, the amusing tricks that her homosexual lover, the Woolworth heir Jimmy ...”

“... to have gone off rather at half-cock. Nietzsche is the first in that field: the rest nowhere. Wyndham Lewis was in his own way a disciple of Nietzsche, but in a style that spoils the purity of the original. Like all ‘no-nonsense’ writers he depends none the less upon the impact of style, which inevitably goes off on its own, creating its own object, a ...”

“... prose was a three-page pamphlet called ‘In Defence of English Cubists’ – mainly an attack on Wyndham Lewis. This leaves me far out of my depth. Bobby Roberts exhibited a few pictures each year at Burlington House. His style never changed. Perhaps it grew stronger. After Bobby’s death, John turned some of their house in St Mark’s Crescent into a ...”

“... by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife of Patrick Leigh Fermor, famous at that time for his activities during the war, including the controversial kidnapping of the German commander on Crete. The third was Barbara ...”

“... was not.’ D.G. Bridson, Laurence Gilliam, Jack Dillon, Douglas Cleverdon, Olive Shapley and Joan Littlewood produced programmes which ranged from adaptations of The Waste Land to features on homelessness and unemployment, from the uncompromisingly highbrow to the popular. Their ‘features’ broke away from the strait jacket of the formal talk or the ...”

“... Dugouts!’) I’ve got a whole shelf on war artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, and the skullishly named Muirhead Bone. I’ve got books about Fabian Ware and the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I’ve a 1920 Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front and a Michelin Somme guide from 1922 – both published ...”

“... losing his admiration for the ‘luminous brutal prose, blocked-in with a painter’s eye’ of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, Powell identified self-pity and sentimentality as besetting weaknesses of romanticism – traits he detected in many well-regarded writers: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce. How did he square this dislike with his admiration for ...”