“... just as it is ungracious not to give its due to Greene’s queer hunger for righteousness. Cyril Connolly once remarked of Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge that all his fellow intellectuals enjoyed it and were then superior about it, and it would be easy to be like that about Greene, or about the high-class best-seller in general. Norman Sherry ...”

“... of the day with outstanding and lasting success: Waugh and John Betjeman. Others tried – Cyril Connolly, for instance – but with less success. Both Waugh and Betjeman employed schoolboy language to effect: ‘Gosh, how scrumptious,’ said Waugh to Lady Diana Cooper’s mother, the Duchess of Rutland, when, on his first visit to Belvoir ...”

“... whether ‘Such, such were the joys’ is a fair account of the prep school Orwell attended with Cyril Connolly. No doubt Orwell would have said it was essentially true. He once praised Martin Chuzzlewit, with its mixture of travel book and fiction, as ‘a good example of Dickens’s habit of telling small lies in order to emphasise what he regards as ...”

“... concentration and reckless frivolity, he was the delight of the bohemian and aesthetic worlds. Cyril Connolly once observed that, at his own prep school, prettiness alone was suspect but prettiness that was good at games meant Character and was safe. Crosland was pretty, and good at everything, and – if you were female, or an ambivalent male ...”

“... pundits so well collected in A Centenary Pessoa agree – Borges, Steiner, Josipovici, Hollander, Cyril Connolly, Roman Jakobson, Mark Strand – it is a compounding of Pessoa’s mystery that he has been anonymous for so long in Anglo-American culture. A canon that includes Pessoa seems infinitely less claustrophobic and bossy. There is, Pessoa writes ...”

“... other, the strange accents and linguistic abuses of the rapacious new elite. Perhaps the idea, as Cyril Connolly writes of Eminent Victorians, is to make his points in ‘the language through which the bourgeois ear’ might be ‘lulled and beguiled’. But the results are jarring. Bruno Salvador, known as Salvo, the narrator of The Mission Song, is the ...”

“... on the Aga Khan’s yacht moored below the windows of the villa in Sardinia where he was staying, Cyril Connolly was desperate to clamber aboard, saying that not to meet the Snowdons was ‘like being in the Garden of Eden without seeing God’. Marlon Brando persuaded Kenneth Tynan to ask her to dinner à trois and then was so tongue-tied that he ...”

“... of table-talk in modern times. He mentions in the Preface to this edition that he was led by Cyril Connolly to take down the small talk of the great, but was essentially writing ‘to put a fence around my experience. In doing so I discovered an alter ego of which I am not especially fond but which, being opposed to capital punishment, I could not ...”

“... with Glaswegian! – when what the novel needs is the substantial drama of characters interacting. Cyril Connolly nailed the syndrome in 1938: ‘It is the novelist who finds it hard to create character who indulges in fine writing.’ Kelman is also finding it hard to create dialogue. The seismographer of vernacular speech, whose prose registers every ...”

“... that he chose to fight in, went out of his way to fight in: he didn’t simply visit Spain like Connolly, Auden and Spender. I’m not quoting this passage to show that Sonia was wrong in her judgment of his ‘character’, making it an article of faith among her own friends that she would have saved him for ‘literature’ from ‘polities’: rather I ...”

“... to slay a many-headed monster, with the ghastly visages of Auden, Isherwood and Britten. Even Cyril Connolly muttered about ‘ambitious young men … with an eye on the main chance’. But unlike Auden, Britten seemed keen to return almost as soon as he arrived in the States. It was in America, despite a great deal of musical ‘expanding’, that ...”

“... of an animal, and when one day in Harrods I found a ring-tailed lemur, lately the property of Cyril Connolly, not even the price of 75 pounds could discourage me from my folly.’ Folly it certainly was. The third time the animal attacked him, it opened an artery in his thigh: ‘I got the tourniquet on and a cigarette lit.’ After that came a ...”

“... Its elegance, its air at times of a prose poem, highly praised at the time by those old troupers, Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee, could also be felt to be inimical to Jacobson’s real sympathies, his own personality. It alienated him from his own book, and although this gave the book certain stylish advantages it also left on the reader a sense of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his wasted time in the farce of paying agents in Lorenço Marques during the war? Perhaps Cyril Connolly said the last word on the spy story when in ‘Bond strikes camp’ he pictured 007 being nearly seduced by a C monstrously attired in drag. The spy story continues to flourish, but no longer do upper-class heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda ...”