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“... Her first book was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and among those who admired her work were Cyril Connolly and Al Alvarez. Edward Lucie-Smith included her in British Poetry since 1945 (1970) and Larkin put her in his Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse (1973). The living afterlife of her next forty years uncannily resembles that of Lynette ...”

“... the generous view of Capote’s talent and importance after the publication of his first book, Cyril Connolly predicted his martyrdom at the hands of a frightened and envious America. Capote’s was an alien kind of perception, but Connolly overstates its danger. And he is generous in his assessment of the degree to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bar where some dead friend used to drink, a bench where you once got a kiss. There’s an essay by Cyril Connolly, ‘One of My Londons’, in which he writes of London as a city of prose. At the point of writing the essay, Connolly found it hard to be in London for more than a few days at a time, so freighted with ...”

“... from the army, that I discovered they held a run of Horizon, the literary magazine started by Cyril Connolly in 1940, and that I eventually did get a scholarship to Oxford I put down to the smattering of culture I gleaned from its pages. In my day, it was a predominantly male institution with the main tables dividing themselves almost on religious or ...”

“... previously been his friends, he commits suicide. Thirty years later James Fox gets together with Cyril Connolly (whom he describes as a ‘revered luminary of the world of letters’) and writes an article on the murder for the Sunday Times Magazine. A further decade passes and Fox writes the book under review, in which the circumstances of the ...”

“... The boredom was partly a generational thing. Evelyn Waugh, b. 1903; Graham Greene, b. 1904; Cyril Connolly, b. 1903; Ian Fleming, b. 1908. These Englishmen came from a similar class background, and had writing careers which, from the outside at least, seemed characterised by brilliant success. They also had parallel lives as ...”

“... thought a bit ridiculous? A host of witnesses are called, friendly and otherwise. After Pritchett, Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise, Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the first American edition of Homage to Catalonia in the early Fifties, and then the testimonies of the Anarchists’ Orwell, the Tribune writers’ Orwell, the Catholic Tablet’s ...”

“... are his contemporaries at Oxford; he takes tea with Ottoline Morrell and twits Virginia Woolf. Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh are London acquaintances. Picasso sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war correspondent, and Paris brings a meeting with James Joyce. His wartime boss at Naval Intelligence is, of course, Ian Fleming, who sends him to ...”

“... as the ‘chubby-faced bewigged figures’ in Picasso’s paintings of that period (C.C. after Cyril Connolly, a friend of Penrose). This makes every bit of sense, but how on earth could we have guessed? Each of Cowling’s notes is informative, discreet and useful. I didn’t know that Alice Derain, wife of the painter so close to the Bloomsbury ...”

“... be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.’ He asked Cyril Connolly never again to invite him to meet Dylan Thomas. ‘He’s exactly what I would have been if I had not been a Catholic.’ He would ask his friends how it was possible for him to deny the existence of evil in the world when there was so much ...”

“... a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year net’ and Cyril Connolly, who organised Horizon’s survey, opted for ‘five pounds a day’ – £100 a day today: ‘If he is to enjoy leisure and privacy, marry, buy books, travel and entertain friends, a writer needs upwards of five pounds a day net. If he is ...”

“... confusion. ‘Insistence on childhood is the radical defect of most ordinary novels of today,’ Cyril Connolly wrote in 1935; and there still are plenty of novelists malingering in their childhood, rooting around for sunny days and glorious oppositions to the hard adult world. Doyle is not one of them: his triumph in this novel is to replenish our ...”

“... Struggle ... or, rather anachronistically one would have thought, Is there honey still for tea? Cyril Connolly makes routine appearances, as if Falstaff had been told to play it in blackface with a Southern accent: indeed, the book resembles those Shakespeare productions which seek to arrest attention by making a travesty of a well-known part ...”

“... Is there a touch of Peter Quennell in the floppy-haired Mark Members? Is J.G. Quiggin really Cyril Connolly? And is Moreland Constant Lambert? Is Dr Trelawney ‘a projection’ of Aleister Crowley? Was Adrian Daintrey Zouch? Is Bagshaw Malcolm Muggeridge? Was Julian Maclaren-Ross the model for Trapnel? Was Widmerpool based on Denis Capel-Dunn? Or ...”