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“... sent a novella called Two Figures by a Fountain to Horizon. It was not accepted, but the editor, Cyril Connolly (or anyway someone who signs himself simply as ‘C.C.’), wrote her a letter running to over a thousand words, with favourable comment on sentences we have already admired. The implication is that the present novel is an expansion of that early ...”

“... of Gray’s biography. Landemare’s father, Mark Young, was coachman to the Liberal MP Cyril Flower. Her mother, Mary, had been in service until her marriage, and the family belonged to what Gray calls ‘the affluent working class’. Between Aldbury, the picturesque but poor village where Landemare was born in 1882, the local market town of Tring ...”

“... on a train to St Pancras to deliver, to his sovereign, the unique bloom of a lily, enclosed in a glass bubble. The man is a harbinger of death, showing how the bloom in its misty bubble is dead as a stone, how the beat of my heart in time with his journey is steadily slower. Other poems recall the mother in a hospital bed, fed with oxygen through a tube in ...”

“... that the bookshops can shift. They can further reflect that whereas in 1972 the three judges were Cyril Connolly, George Steiner and Elizabeth Bowen, in 1987 a television newscaster, by virtue of having written a biography of Viv Richards, was at least more ‘literary’ than one of the other judges. And then the novelists had better conclude that the only ...”

“... simply thought that he was more promising than we were: he had a duty to deliver. Then, his death. Cyril Connolly’s famous tag had been one of Hope’s favourites, and I have to confess that it plopped lumpishly into my head a minute or two after I heard that he’d been killed: ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.’ He wouldn’t ...”

“... a flight of marble steps under open arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in stained glass which by 1941 was just beginning to buckle. Ahead was the Adults’ Library, lofty, airy and inviting; to the right was the Junior Library, a low dark room made darker by the books which, regardless of their contents, had been bound in heavy boards of ...”

“... of his wives, ran for mayor, made movies, taunted feminists, advocated street crime and graffiti. Glass in hand, Capote was photographed with every shipping tycoon and movie star of his era. They were competing with Hollywood, and they knew it. And they were competing with the previous generation. The giant legend of Hemingway, for all the holes that would be ...”

“... warned by her mother that something so appalling was going to happen to her that she should put a glass of milk and a plate of biscuits by her bedside to console her when it was all over, left her new husband drinking downstairs and went to bed to wait for him. She was later woken as he stumbled in, glanced in her direction, mumbled, ‘Biscuits. Oh ...”

“... 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 news, ‘You’d be ...”

“... of beef’ and ‘breast of chicken from the jar’ fed to the convalescing Leamas to the ‘glass-fronted sentry box with a “Scenes of England” calendar and a line of mossy telephones’ in the secret service’s lobby in Tinker Tailor, the surface realism generated by the vigilant class arrangements is assisted by le Carré’s command of gloomy ...”

“... all apparently of their own accord. While they were gathered in the front parlour, a wine glass escaped a locked cabinet in the kitchen and smashed; Alma’s teacup and saucer rose from her hands, the saucer splitting neatly in mid-air; a huge piece of coal in the grate careered across the living room and slammed into the wall. On an inside page the ...”

“... 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 put to ...”

“... promised goods, and Cunningham makes the mistake of laying fictional extracts by Sartre, Malraux, Cyril Connolly and Graham Greene alongside factual accounts which blast them off the page. The Chicago reporter Jay Allen catches the tail-end of the Badajoz massacre, where the bull ring was inches deep in blood, and he watches a workman stopped in the street to ...”

“... George Inn (‘delightful’), The Crown (with ‘a swirly carpet’, owned by a fraudster called Cyril), The White Hart, The King’s Arms (‘lobster thermidor’). He lists the secret vices of this world – ‘winklepickers, illegitimacy, tinned salmon, canals, hair cream’ – and its characteristic foods: ‘towers of biscuits, Camp Coffee, Shippam’s ...”

“... too 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 ...”