“... of every social relationship’. The book was ‘an excellent manual for the hard-boiled’, Cyril Connolly wrote in wary admiration.The star turn in The Wild Body is a grotesque called Bestre, an innkeeper who regards his customers as foes to be humiliated and conducts long campaigns of ‘Bestre-warfare’ against his neighbours. He is an ...”

“... me, even before I considered the enormous ‘Copie’ which was going to form its second part. Cyril Connolly called it a ‘Baedeker of futility’ and listed it as number two in his hundred key books of the Modern Movement. A catalogue of human ignorance and human stupidity, with the two titular characters making the same mistakes over and over ...”

“... arriving, friends greeting each other, an excitable afternoon audience’. The description is Cyril Connolly’s, the occasion a showing of Luis Buñuel’s first film, Un Chien andalou. The audience seemed baffled at the end, and some of its members were angry, unprepared no doubt for what Connolly called the ...”

“... to go into the GPO in O’Connell Street without a single thought for MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse, or without remembering for a second that Samuel Beckett once asked his friend Con Leventhal to betake himself ‘to the Dublin Post Office and measure the height of the ground to Cúchulainn’s arse’, as Neary in his novel Murphy wished to ...”

“... The Old Mill or The Old Forge or The Old Rectory. All of them, I imagine, with prams in the hall. Cyril Connolly’s strictures on this point may have been one of the reasons Larkin claimed The Condemned Playground as his sacred book and which led him, meeting Connolly, uncharacteristically to blurt out: ‘You formed ...”

“... a look at me. Jermey said: ‘We got the bastard.’ The desk sergeant replied: ‘Oh, nice one Cyril.’ And that, how does that sound? To me it was more sinister than Jermey’s brutish and crude threats. The officers wore hard faces. They ran me along to the cells and pushed me inside. I was searched. All the time, they kept up their threats and ...”