“... overrated by the latest survivors of the Romantic tradition, though never by himself. The late Cyril Connolly, during an exchange in the New Statesman soon after Housman’s death, now conveniently reprinted in Christopher Ricks’s Housman volume in the series ‘20th-century Views’, drew attention to many weaknesses: but if one can accept them on ...”

“... knew what a talks producer was or what he did. The magazine editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely ...”

“... he felt himself to be a charity boy. But he went on to take Eton in his stride – even if, as Cyril Connolly averred, he was there beaten in his 19th year: he has nowhere, it is true, much to say about the place, but he retained fellow Etonians among his friends to the end of his life. Lewis’s short sojourn at Malvern was a disastrous encounter ...”

“... same time, Edith too was hitting the jackpot with her full-hearted Fanfare for Elizabeth. And when Cyril Connolly – himself a somewhat Osbertish phenomenon, without the wealth – devoted a 1947 number of Horizon to persuading the world, and himself, that the Sitwells had ‘since 1938 grown enormously in stature’, Osbert’s pleasure was complete. As ...”

“... which were derived from Hemingway’s friend, Barklie Henry; even Lady Emerald Cunard remarking to Cyril Connolly that Hemingway struck her ‘as androgynous’. ‘You may think it bizarre of me.’ she added, ‘It is not the mot juste perhaps. But that is how he struck me.’ Bizarre no more. For if Lynn occasionally pushes the envelope (as they are ...”

“... he is forgiving himself as fast as he is making the accusations. He says later, in a letter to Cyril Connolly which he includes in the Diaries, that it was ‘an altogether irresponsible act’ to go to America when he did; but then adds that his not returning to England was a different matter, related to a fear not of the Blitz but of his own ...”

“... to his advantage in his fiction, where the middle-class female world is observed with a tone that Cyril Connolly described as ‘demure malice’. Such a resource wasn’t available for his day to day dealings with Lily Forster, a figure whose presence permeates these volumes long after she is dead. There’s obviously much about their lives together ...”

“... inordinate number of clubs where he recorded the sayings of friends who ranged from Dean Inge to Cyril Asquith. All his life he dipped into French memoirs, biographies, obituaries and the Law Reports, gleaning rare and curious specimens of human idiosyncrasy. The Notebooks are filled with the trouvailles of his reading and the aphorisms and quaint sayings of ...”

“... by the subsequent careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a ...”

“... I have ever judg’d ... I am sure I have your approbation.’ In such places, Dryden becomes the Cyril Connolly of the 17th century. Those who have played the weekly game of seeing how many sentences Connolly could write before mentioning himself (two or three, perhaps?) may find a new reason to view Dryden with ...”

“... barbarous’ was a rare and late statement. The nastiest attack from the intellectuals was by Cyril Connolly in a review of Present Indicative, Coward’s first memoir, published in 1937, in which he was frank about what Soden calls his ‘patchy and undistinguished’ military career. Connolly described it as the ...”

“... choosing the word altogether exactly.’Spender emerges from these stories looking, as his friend Cyril Connolly put it, like ‘an inspired simpleton, a great big silly goose’. He makes a memorable entrance as Stephen Savage in Christopher Isherwood’s thinly fictionalised novel Lions and Shadows (1938): ‘He burst in upon us, blushing, sniggering ...”

“... baffled by most of its contents and even more so by Burgess’s questions about Harold Nicolson, Cyril Connolly and London literary life. The wife in Kafka’s Dick is another unmetropolitan waif, and the sports-mad Rudge in The History Boys, rather than the sensitive Posner, is the real outsider.I ought to be embarrassed by these recurrences and did I ...”

“... home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender of Horizon, Craxton found a friend, an indulgent patron and a way into the avant-garde. He had a narrow brush with conscription, from which he was exempted because, according to the sergeant who gave him the ...”

“... non-academic criticism, so despite his title we hear nothing of such critics as Virginia Woolf and Cyril Connolly in Britain or Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley in the US. ‘There is much to be said … about the history of the idea of “criticism” before its entry into the university,’ he concedes in a footnote. ‘Naturally I cannot say it ...”