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“... not because John was his father that he hated him with such a passion, but because he wasn’t. Cyril Connolly, who also suffered from an alcoholic father, admitted in his Sunday Times review to being engrossed by Father Figure. ‘Homicidal ruthlessness,’ he wrote, ‘must be added to my estimate of Mr Nichols’s character.’ He used most of the ...”

“... supplant with disgrace after hours. Thus, in a Neal Street restaurant, he observes his table-mate Cyril Connolly weeping over an overdone partridge. ‘Stephen laughed. Pauline de Rothschild ate only one pear. W.H. Auden was silent.’ Plante and his partner were smart, pretty, adulatory and new – a shoo-in to the company of elderly gays and needy ...”

“... many men in Skelton’s life, the three who got it into a serious muddle were all seriously ugly: Cyril Connolly, her first husband; George Weidenfeld, her second; and her last recorded lover, the French writer Bernard Frank. There is no photograph of her third husband, the millionaire Derek Jackson, but he did not seriously engross her. She bit him ...”

“... letters in the shadow of the novel gives a new resonance to her remark, made not to Ritchie but to Cyril Connolly, that ‘I am fully intelligent only when I write.’ The Bowen who wrote to Ritchie was almost always at a seeming disadvantage, the pursuer, the less-beloved. At times the inequality of feeling is such that infatuation does indeed seem to ...”

“... at that time to fervid inkiness and illustrational hypertension. The article went down well. (Cyril Connolly was nice about it in the Sunday Times lift.) Bacon will have found that he went unmentioned (not a neo-romantic) and that the reproduction of Lucian Freud’s 1952 portrait of a luminously doleful John Minton made page 74 the one page worth ...”

“... when they go on a lot about the dear old days at school or the ’varsity. Not even the inspired Cyril Connolly could get his tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off ...”

“... divorced from her mother when Joan was two). She goes to parties with his rather pre-war friends, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender. She has an affair with Lucian Freud, she visits Oxford, becomes pregnant and marries into a more modern set: her husband, a friend of Ken Tynan and Kingsley Amis, has to be indoctrinated into her mother’s ...”

“... great many rejection slips, by the consciousness of which he was haunted also. (We all shuddered. Cyril putting on an expression as though he were stuffed with John’s rejection slips.) The passage comes close to calling the grave Eliot banal. Cyril Connolly elsewhere invites Stephen to ‘look at me in my bath. Hot ...”

“... both successful and would-be escapees, is I Hate It Here.’ He quotes from a letter written by Cyril Connolly in 1929. ‘I do think that during the war something in this country got killed ... I have plumped against England ... I do feel it is a dying civilisation – decadent, but in such a damned dull way – going stuffy and comatose instead of ...”

“... Letters, and chief reviewer for the Sunday Times. Among his protégés were Raymond Mortimer and Cyril Connolly. Altogether he did as much as anybody to establish or maintain the tone, the interests and the values of weekly literary journalism in the first half of this century. As to whether we ought to be grateful, opinion is divided between Lord ...”

“... by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the Spanish Civil War from Barcelona (where he gets drunk with Hemingway), is recruited to Naval Intelligence by Ian Fleming and dispatched to Portugal to spy on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, becomes a prisoner ...”

“... I remember that remark and am tempted to skip. In brutal truth, if you do, you don’t miss much. Cyril Connolly once said that if we threw out every novel written by a writer under the age of thirty, it would be ‘amusing to note how little is lost’. If you skip dreams in prose fiction, how much are you really missing, in terms of the canon? I ...”

“... and messy love lives of the so-called Horizon circle: the people who clustered adoringly around Cyril Connolly during his years as editor of the short-lived literary magazine (1939-50). Was Connolly still carrying on his affair with Diana Witherby when he started his affair with Lys (while still married to Jean and ...”

“... and a former deputy editor of the London Magazine. He has written well-received biographies of Cyril Connolly and Allen Lane, and has already published three volumes of autobiography, the last entitled Grub Street Irregular. Now he has written a book which is, the blurb tells us, ‘both a riveting exercise in group biography and a masterly account of ...”

“... attacking and assimilating mid-century permissiveness and the Welfare State. The literary critic Cyril Connolly created the permissive society, it is made to seem, and we are told how the disciplined Evelyn Waugh detected the ‘enormity’ of a ten-point programme for the future which Connolly had published in ...”