“... out of the modernist mainstream. His work was not, Soden points out, so different in its themes. Evelyn Waugh’s take on the Bright Young Things, Vile Bodies, was exactly contemporary with Private Lives. Auden and Isherwood made use of revue, music hall and jazz. Virginia Woolf explored bisexuality in her life and work. Woolf did develop a fragile and ...”

“... for Mac-Neice’s cool aloofness (when he wasn’t ‘egregiously cheeky’), and for Evelyn Waugh’s dislike of everything Cunningham dislikes (‘Auden deserved Waugh’s chidings. So did Waugh’). Yet even the writers who enjoy intermittent praise in this book must ...”

“... invented a spy-ring. To populate it, he says, he invented characters and gave them names from Evelyn Waugh novels. In filling out his ‘bald and unconvincing narrative’, Cooper was drawing on the cultural resources available to a public school-educated, middle-class Englishman. To Cooper’s surprise, his interrogators found his invented account ...”

“... to be a listener and a bad one to be a talker, so I’d followed that ethos to the letter. It was Evelyn Waugh who said that when a writer is born into a family the family is over. And why would it be any different when a second family comes to call? Julian wanted a brother, a friend, a PR guru, a chief of staff, a speechwriter, and he wanted that person ...”