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“... of the day with outstanding and lasting success: Waugh and John Betjeman. Others tried – Cyril Connolly, for instance – but with less success. Both Waugh and Betjeman employed schoolboy language to effect: ‘Gosh, how scrumptious,’ said Waugh to Lady Diana Cooper’s mother, the Duchess of Rutland, when, on his first visit to Belvoir ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... non-academic criticism, so despite his title we hear nothing of such critics as Virginia Woolf and Cyril Connolly in Britain or Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley in the US. ‘There is much to be said … about the history of the idea of “criticism” before its entry into the university,’ he concedes in a footnote. ‘Naturally I cannot say it ...”

“... other, the strange accents and linguistic abuses of the rapacious new elite. Perhaps the idea, as Cyril Connolly writes of Eminent Victorians, is to make his points in ‘the language through which the bourgeois ear’ might be ‘lulled and beguiled’. But the results are jarring. Bruno Salvador, known as Salvo, the narrator of The Mission Song, is the ...”

“... baffled by most of its contents and even more so by Burgess’s questions about Harold Nicolson, Cyril Connolly and London literary life. The wife in Kafka’s Dick is another unmetropolitan waif, and the sports-mad Rudge in The History Boys, rather than the sensitive Posner, is the real outsider.I ought to be embarrassed by these recurrences and did I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with Glaswegian! – when what the novel needs is the substantial drama of characters interacting. Cyril Connolly nailed the syndrome in 1938: ‘It is the novelist who finds it hard to create character who indulges in fine writing.’ Kelman is also finding it hard to create dialogue. The seismographer of vernacular speech, whose prose registers every ...”

“... on the Aga Khan’s yacht moored below the windows of the villa in Sardinia where he was staying, Cyril Connolly was desperate to clamber aboard, saying that not to meet the Snowdons was ‘like being in the Garden of Eden without seeing God’. Marlon Brando persuaded Kenneth Tynan to ask her to dinner à trois and then was so tongue-tied that he ...”

“... that he chose to fight in, went out of his way to fight in: he didn’t simply visit Spain like Connolly, Auden and Spender. I’m not quoting this passage to show that Sonia was wrong in her judgment of his ‘character’, making it an article of faith among her own friends that she would have saved him for ‘literature’ from ‘polities’: rather I ...”

“... Its elegance, its air at times of a prose poem, highly praised at the time by those old troupers, Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee, could also be felt to be inimical to Jacobson’s real sympathies, his own personality. It alienated him from his own book, and although this gave the book certain stylish advantages it also left on the reader a sense of ...”

“... to slay a many-headed monster, with the ghastly visages of Auden, Isherwood and Britten. Even Cyril Connolly muttered about ‘ambitious young men … with an eye on the main chance’. But unlike Auden, Britten seemed keen to return almost as soon as he arrived in the States. It was in America, despite a great deal of musical ‘expanding’, that ...”

“... of an animal, and when one day in Harrods I found a ring-tailed lemur, lately the property of Cyril Connolly, not even the price of 75 pounds could discourage me from my folly.’ Folly it certainly was. The third time the animal attacked him, it opened an artery in his thigh: ‘I got the tourniquet on and a cigarette lit.’ After that came a ...”

“... strings. He was rapidly found a job in the Ministry of Information. By now, he was well connected. Cyril Connolly and ‘the Horizon crowd’ had adopted him, at first an odd and slightly pathetic foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune ...”

“... which I come into. He’d put originally that Francis Wyndham, one of the senior editors, wanted Cyril Connolly to write something, and I immediately looked myself up and it said: ‘Francis Wyndham, un des rédacteurs les plus âgés’, as if I was one of the oldest editors there’s ever been. AH: Was there a feeling of tension and difficulty on the ...”

“... Having invited White to contribute something to Horizon about her reconversion at the end of 1942, Cyril Connolly was appalled by what he received: ‘it was like watching a person making desperate attempts to retain their reason and finally lapsing into insanity.’ One has to agree: sanity is a long way off as White signs on to become a cleaning lady at ...”