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“... sea and sky were clear; living was cheap; there were few motor-cars, there were few people.’ (Cyril Connolly hadn’t yet got there.) And Elizabeth David herself couldn’t have found fault with the food. Her mother for the time being was calm, a pleasure to be with. ‘So there we sat Chez Schwob, my mother and I, sun-warmed, looking at the sea and ...”

“... they possess in Lewis Carroll or in Kafka. The chapel at the great house, with its Art Nouveau glass and trappings, is based on the church at Madresfield, the Lygon house near Bristol. But that is mere corroborative detail: much more in keeping with true Waugh fantasy is Sebastian’s sudden whim of taking Charles Ryder to visit his old nanny at ...”

“... with tiles designed by William Morris, and its staircase led to a corridor illuminated by stained glass designed by Edward Burne-Jones.’ By the end of 1890 Constance and Lady Mount-Temple had become so close that Constance was referring to her as her ‘mother’. When she was ill at Christmas, Lady Mount-Temple visited her. On 26 December she ...”

“... me, or that a bizarre bucolic force field would hurl me back somewhere in the region of the M25. Cyril Connolly, himself not a notable hiker, once said that no city should be so large that a man could not walk out of it in a morning. London, while by no means on a par with the megacities of the emergent East or Africa, still takes a very long day to egress ...”

“... fellows of All Souls, both lawyers, also had reason to be interested in Hastings at the time: Cyril Radcliffe served on the Boundary Commission for India, while the egregiously indolent John Sparrow would shortly be asked if he would provide a constitution for Pakistan, a request about which he made the characteristic observation, ‘Declined: too busy ...”

“... because I read them too): The Wind in the Willows, The Sword in the Stone, Through the Looking-Glass, Burglar Bill, Alfie Gets in First, Where the Wild Things Are. Piaget’s theories of childhood development are introduced, as are some of the problems with them. We learn that ‘by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 it would already have been ...”

“... Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear Pepys. The persistent excellence of the stool has been one of this disease’s most tedious features. When will you get it into your head ...”

“... she published her first novel when she was 21, and married her cousin – a designer of stained glass – three years later; by the time she was 31 she was widowed with three children and in debt. She wrote because she liked writing, which ‘came natural’ to her; she also wrote because she had to support her children and an increasing band of dependent ...”

“... Virgin Mary has a stable identity as the mother of Jesus, but at least one document (attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem) bundled all the Marys into one. More commonly, the Marys have combined and then divided, only to fuse again with other, unnamed women in Jesus’s circle. They seem particularly attracted to Mary Magdalene, to whom they cluster like pins to a ...”

“... Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress in Greene’s The Quiet American – a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in the hall – as ‘a toy for her lover’. In Hazzard’s fiction there are very few children, and the ones who do appear are not particularly rewarding. But they are not the enemy. The enemy is ...”

“... rubbed his hands, drawn his armchair closer to his cosy radiator, filled his pipe, grasped his glass of Jack Daniel’s and eagerly opened The Sound and the Fury for the sheer pleasure of yet another reading. None of this is to propose that William Faulkner was a non-writer. He was a richly gifted writer and there are times when he writes with real ...”

“... fit himself in among the homocommunists (a useful portmanteau word Brooke coined, later adopted by Cyril Connolly in Horizon), but Communism proved wholly unpalatable, and politics, like efforts to grow a moustache, were given up. He might, perhaps, in his own manner, have been called an existentialist, disliking the pressure of all abstract ideas, but he ...”

“... A biker delivers some proofs from PFD, and as I’m signing for them, asks what’s my opinion of Cyril Connolly and why is it he’s less well thought of than, say, twenty years ago. Because he’s not long dead is the short answer and also, I suppose, because the literary scene has changed, with no one critic presiding in the way Connolly and (to a lesser ...”

“... at Brown’s antipathy to the new writers he was keen to employ. An instrumental figure here was Cyril Connolly, who had been hired over the objections of both Brown and Waldorf as the paper’s arts and books editor and quickly replaced the Observer’s old-guard reviewers, ‘bookmen’ like Brown, with fashionable names that Waldorf didn’t know (‘I do ...”

“... strings. He was rapidly found a job in the Ministry of Information. By now, he was well connected. Cyril Connolly and ‘the Horizon crowd’ had adopted him, at first an odd and slightly pathetic foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune ...”