“... to be part of their life. It wasn’t hard for her. Older, very clever men were devoted to her. Cyril Connolly brought her into Horizon, where she learned fast and eventually, to the chagrin of some who were not used to receiving editorial decisions from 25-year-old women, more or less ran it, while its editors went off in search of love and sun. She ...”

“... scored with a whole bestiary of sacred monsters. Jackson would boast that ‘after King Farouk, Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld, I was the pretty one.’ Skelton, like many of his wives and lovers and Jackson himself (his brother Vivian too), was besotted with animals. She was particularly in love with her coati, a raccoon-like creature which she ...”

“... no doubt, with the idea that a double life is completely natural for a writer, if not essential. Cyril Connolly, writing about World within World, Spender’s autobiography, caught the central Spender enigma with the eye of a dispirited novelist: Mr Spender has always seemed to me two people. Let us call them S I and S II. S I is the youthful poet as ...”

“... was perhaps bewilderment that any artist’s style could be so unutterably debased, could – as Cyril Connolly fumed – ‘embrace every cliché, every vulgarity, every banal and cheaply-scented expression’, that persuaded people that there must be something there. Later on, for friends are loyal, there was a mild effort to represent him as a ...”

“... promised goods, and Cunningham makes the mistake of laying fictional extracts by Sartre, Malraux, Cyril Connolly and Graham Greene alongside factual accounts which blast them off the page. The Chicago reporter Jay Allen catches the tail-end of the Badajoz massacre, where the bull ring was inches deep in blood, and he watches a workman stopped in the ...”

“... On the other hand, literati, illuminati and eggheads could not bear it. After four years of war, Cyril Connolly, editing Horizon, printed a comprehensive explanation of why he (and other editors) did not welcome contributions from women. There was a strong tide running against them. According to him their subject-matter was too familiar, usually petty ...”

“... Precocious Beverley Nichols headed the field with Twenty-Five while Christopher Isherwood and Cyril Connolly wisely allowed another ten years of their lives to elapse before they wrote, respectively, Lions and Shadows and Enemies of Promise. Hillier publishes long sections of Summoned by Bells which were excised, including several cruel references to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... potent mix of youth and constant sunshine. He and Auden would be heavily criticised (in a piece by Cyril Connolly in Horizon, which Connolly edited and to which Spender contributed) for seeking hedonistic freedoms in the US while the bombs fell at home, but it’s probably a mistake, overall, to look to creative writers ...”

“... these entries is a little too rehearsed, his unsparing, lurid self-inventory reminiscent of Cyril Connolly counting his blemishes – Connolly, another cosmopolitan, productive, libertine sloth who excelled as a weekly reviewer and longer essayist (and was a superb editor of Horizon), yet flailed himself with ...”

“... remarks about others of Bowra’s generation. Most poignant of all, in a fragment of a letter to Cyril Connolly, written late in life, Bowra laments that he had never known enough love: ‘Life without it is a terrible, impoverished affair, and the older one gets, the worse it is. I find myself drying up, without lust or rage to sting me on.’ Rage ...”

“... He said that the intelligentsia ‘turned a cold shoulder on me’, though he had admirers in Cyril Connolly and Desmond MacCarthy. He thought the reason he wasn’t admired was that his prose was too plain – no lyrical flights, no metaphors. In Cakes and Ale he has a pop not just at Hugh Walpole, but at the whole edifice of literary London: men of ...”

“... too respectful of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens is at his best when on the attack. He can’t stand Cyril Connolly, whom he sees as a precious old reactionary: ‘another dose of the familiar compound ... some rackety travelling, a tincture of furtive sex (with much sniggering about lesbians), and the business of voyaging long distances the better to fret ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... like T.E. Lawrence and, later, his brother; Shaw (despite the differences over his portrait); and Cyril Connolly were more likely than sculptors or painters to be Epstein’s advocates. His commercial success depended on a few patrons, above all John Quinn, who bought much of his early carving, and on the demand for portraiture from a group very much ...”