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“... society enjoyed the fruits of success,’ Cecil Beaton wrote apropos of the party she gave to mark Cyril Connolly’s 50th birthday. ‘And no one wasted their time in banalities.’ Not everyone – especially not her husbands – could handle so much brilliance, but there was always a chance that the outsider’s bemusement would further enhance the ...”

“... of the modern-day Arts Council. Much of this is fascinating stuff. Taylor can tell you how much Cyril Connolly was paid for a weekly newspaper article in the 1960s, or for how much Anthony Burgess sold the film rights of A Clockwork Orange. The book is crammed with intriguing chunks of information. We learn that Harold Monro, who established the Poetry ...”

“... the fascinating status of a sacred monster. Although Carpenter skilfully weaves the friends – Connolly, Betjeman, Anthony Powell, Brian Howard, Robert Byron – into a completed composition, the others serve chiefly to start a scene or two and swell the progress of Waugh himself. Of course this gives a misleading picture of period and individuals, but ...”

“... from wondering what might have been if he had married someone else. After all, he did once advise Cyril Connolly to marry a woman who attracted him in preference to one he rather liked. And easily the most affecting document quoted by the Cecils is a letter from Molly on the matter of her sexual loneliness:   You see at the bottom of it all is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or too aggressive in a country town’) and building types. There were passages ...”

“... it until the sixpences came out. A sad, chaotic man, obsessed by his superficial likeness to Cyril Connolly. The enemy of his own not lesser promise, he wrote prodigiously about ...”

“... never do any better, but that is their cul-de-sac, not mine.’ But all credit to them, and to Cyril Connolly who was the first to publish him (‘Sickert at St Peter’s’ appeared in Horizon in August 1942), for being so certain that he ...”

“... person”.’ Like all great entertainers, Coward knew how to exploit his moment. In the Thirties Cyril Connolly was complaining that his plays were ‘written in the most topical and perishable way imaginable, the cream in them turns sour overnight.’ Coward liked to call himself ‘Destiny’s Tot’, but he was England’s solid-gold jazz-baby who ...”

“... Over the years and pages he introduces us with incomparable geniality to all his friends – from Cyril Connolly and the Duke of Wellington to ballet dancers and Balkan countesses. Mary McCarthy makes an appearance, as target of a tale rather than begetter of one. An elderly and extremely rich New York spinster, proud of her cousinship with Lizzie ...”

“... It is what I am most grateful to him for. He is buried in Berwick churchyard, a few yards from Cyril Connolly, whose memorial stone, inscribed with a line from Virgil (‘There is fresh water within, and seats in the living rock’), is evidently intended to dispel any thought of the grave as unquiet. Among Allon’s papers there was a two-page ...”

“... as Martin Green’s Children of the Sun, in which people like Harold Acton and Brian Howard and Cyril Connolly, and all who profess to believe that heterosexual affairs are ‘the mark of state-subsidised undergraduates’, are dug reeking from their lairs, scraped and dumped. Like Orwell, he has a particular loathing for such people when they also ...”

“... Donald Maclean got drunk. They had, she says, some ‘idyllic years’ together, though the man Cyril Connolly called ‘the London Freddyair’ had his glum moments, waking his partner as he sang in his sleep ‘I’m always on the outside, on the outside looking in.’ She also tells us that the author of Language, Truth and Logic was the ‘only ...”

“... tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with biographers as first-hand testimony to what the subject was genuinely feeling at the ...”

“... and posed logistical challenges like paper rationing – did still more damage. In December 1942, Cyril Connolly described Horizon as ‘a magazine which to defeat the call-up had learned to appear without writers, which can see only in the blackout, which can comment only on disaster, or to maintain itself in a paper shortage’. Horizon’s ...”