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“... 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 about some ...”

“... 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 more nearly ...”

“... 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 a big ...”

“... sorts of people turned up for the weekend; the guest list in the interwar years included George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, H.G. Wells, Mary Pickford, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin – even Gandhi. David’s prolonged exposure to celebrities in his childhood meant that they held no fear for him as an adult. Sometimes, when Nancy got ...”

“... Madan? No one today would expect to find in a Times leader anything quotable, but in the heyday of Bernard Darwin’s fourth leaders, its staff were expected to turn phrases like fishcakes: ‘He liked what he considered to be the best conversation including his own,’ ‘The saying that there are two kinds of pedestrian, the quick and the dead, is well ...”

“... in unhighbrow surroundings. In short, the facts of Brooke’s life are more than usually relevant. Bernard Jocelyn Brooke was born 30 November 1908, third child and second son of Henry Brooke and his wife Mary, née Turner, the youngest of the family by ten years or more. Both his grandfathers had been wine merchants, also his father, who had started life as a ...”

“... sense of accuracy without the mediation of the introspective mind. He is not created. No more than Bernard and Louis, and the characters in The Years and the rest of her novels, is Bogey Harris transformed into a work of art. That is his point, she might reply: that is what I am aiming at. ‘Of course this is external,’ she says, as she meditates the ...”

“... up quite well. And the plays brought in a lot of money. ‘I had achieved what I wanted . . . Bernard Partridge drew a cartoon for Punch in which William Shakespeare was shown biting his fingers in front of the boards that advertised my plays.’ As a wit-about-town, Maugham had various dalliances with women. His lust for chaps was a fairly open secret in ...”

“... 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 ...”