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“... he felt himself to be a charity boy. But he went on to take Eton in his stride – even if, as Cyril Connolly averred, he was there beaten in his 19th year: he has nowhere, it is true, much to say about the place, but he retained fellow Etonians among his friends to the end of his life. Lewis’s short sojourn at Malvern was a disastrous encounter ...”

“... overrated by the latest survivors of the Romantic tradition, though never by himself. The late Cyril Connolly, during an exchange in the New Statesman soon after Housman’s death, now conveniently reprinted in Christopher Ricks’s Housman volume in the series ‘20th-century Views’, drew attention to many weaknesses: but if one can accept them on ...”

“... like 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 ...”

“... he is forgiving himself as fast as he is making the accusations. He says later, in a letter to Cyril Connolly which he includes in the Diaries, that it was ‘an altogether irresponsible act’ to go to America when he did; but then adds that his not returning to England was a different matter, related to a fear not of the Blitz but of his own ...”

“... He said that the intelligentsia ‘turned a cold shoulder on me’, though he had admirers in Cyril Connolly and Desmond MacCarthy. He thought the reason he wasn’t admired was that his prose was too plain – no lyrical flights, no metaphors. In Cakes and Ale he has a pop not just at Hugh Walpole, but at the whole edifice of literary London: men of ...”

“... remarks about others of Bowra’s generation. Most poignant of all, in a fragment of a letter to Cyril Connolly, written late in life, Bowra laments that he had never known enough love: ‘Life without it is a terrible, impoverished affair, and the older one gets, the worse it is. I find myself drying up, without lust or rage to sting me on.’ Rage ...”

“... to his advantage in his fiction, where the middle-class female world is observed with a tone that Cyril Connolly described as ‘demure malice’. Such a resource wasn’t available for his day to day dealings with Lily Forster, a figure whose presence permeates these volumes long after she is dead. There’s obviously much about their lives together ...”

“... inordinate number of clubs where he recorded the sayings of friends who ranged from Dean Inge to Cyril Asquith. All his life he dipped into French memoirs, biographies, obituaries and the Law Reports, gleaning rare and curious specimens of human idiosyncrasy. The Notebooks are filled with the trouvailles of his reading and the aphorisms and quaint sayings of ...”

“... I have ever judg’d ... I am sure I have your approbation.’ In such places, Dryden becomes the Cyril Connolly of the 17th century. Those who have played the weekly game of seeing how many sentences Connolly could write before mentioning himself (two or three, perhaps?) may find a new reason to view Dryden with ...”

“... by the subsequent careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a ...”

“... barbarous’ was a rare and late statement. The nastiest attack from the intellectuals was by Cyril Connolly in a review of Present Indicative, Coward’s first memoir, published in 1937, in which he was frank about what Soden calls his ‘patchy and undistinguished’ military career. Connolly described it as the ...”

“... choosing the word altogether exactly.’Spender emerges from these stories looking, as his friend Cyril Connolly put it, like ‘an inspired simpleton, a great big silly goose’. He makes a memorable entrance as Stephen Savage in Christopher Isherwood’s thinly fictionalised novel Lions and Shadows (1938): ‘He burst in upon us, blushing, sniggering ...”

“... just as it is ungracious not to give its due to Greene’s queer hunger for righteousness. Cyril Connolly once remarked of Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge that all his fellow intellectuals enjoyed it and were then superior about it, and it would be easy to be like that about Greene, or about the high-class best-seller in general. Norman Sherry ...”

“... pundits so well collected in A Centenary Pessoa agree – Borges, Steiner, Josipovici, Hollander, Cyril Connolly, Roman Jakobson, Mark Strand – it is a compounding of Pessoa’s mystery that he has been anonymous for so long in Anglo-American culture. A canon that includes Pessoa seems infinitely less claustrophobic and bossy. There is, Pessoa writes ...”

“... concentration and reckless frivolity, he was the delight of the bohemian and aesthetic worlds. Cyril Connolly once observed that, at his own prep school, prettiness alone was suspect but prettiness that was good at games meant Character and was safe. Crosland was pretty, and good at everything, and – if you were female, or an ambivalent male ...”