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“... 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 ...”

“... fit himself in among the homocommunists (a useful portmanteau word Brooke coined, later adopted by Cyril Connolly in Horizon), but Communism proved wholly unpalatable, and politics, like efforts to grow a moustache, were given up. He might, perhaps, in his own manner, have been called an existentialist, disliking the pressure of all abstract ideas, but he ...”

“... of his wasted time in the farce of paying agents in Lorenço Marques during the war? Perhaps Cyril Connolly said the last word on the spy story when in ‘Bond strikes camp’ he pictured 007 being nearly seduced by a C monstrously attired in drag. The spy story continues to flourish, but no longer do upper-class heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda ...”

“... was on its last legs: the third and final anthology appeared in 1945 (without a manifesto column). Cyril Connolly was in charge of Horizon and Stephen Spender was terribly at large: Encounter was in the offing, with Spender at the helm. The Movement poets were preparing the ground for a new English mannerism, insular, bittersweet, and piously ...”

“... the most significant and influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The ...”

“... seems to account for even the mildly disobliging anecdotes, like one about not dining well at the Cyril Connollys’: ‘Whether or not the proprietor of a mobile coffee-stall got wind of this, one of these was certainly parked every night in a strategic position just opposite the house. There Connolly dinner-guests would ...”

“... of Orwell’s impoverishment, to be sure, was self-inflicted: while a few of his fellow Etonians (Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton) were bursting precociously into print, Orwell chose to slave away in Parisian kitchens even when he was coughing up blood, sleep in dosshouses while cadging the odd ten shillings off his bemused parents, put in a spot of ...”

“... an inner art which made life, made interest. And in October 1938 she is lamenting the fact that Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise has called her one of the ‘Mandarins’. Absurdly wide of the mark this now seems, for her vision and method as a writer have proved to be wholly and pervasively democratic. Her ghost is behind TV features, tapes and ...”

“... Wilson and Lionel Trilling, and special allowance might have to be made for the senses in which Cyril Connolly was ‘influential’ or George Orwell a ‘man of letters’. But I would be surprised if any serious contender for that title between about 1930 and 1980 were more prolific than VSP. Gore Vidal, always a master of understated ...”

“... celebrated innocence and others’ doubts about its authenticity. Reviewing World within World, Cyril Connolly discerned a distinction between Spender I (‘an inspired simpleton, a great big silly goose, a holy Russian idiot’) and Spender II (‘shrewd, ambitious, aggressive and ruthless’). Several observers played with some variation on Spender ...”

“... at Brown’s antipathy to the new writers he was keen to employ. An instrumental figure here was Cyril Connolly, who had been hired over the objections of both Brown and Waldorf as the paper’s arts and books editor and quickly replaced the Observer’s old-guard reviewers, ‘bookmen’ like Brown, with fashionable names that Waldorf didn’t know ...”

“... A biker delivers some proofs from PFD, and as I’m signing for them, asks what’s my opinion of Cyril Connolly and why is it he’s less well thought of than, say, twenty years ago. Because he’s not long dead is the short answer and also, I suppose, because the literary scene has changed, with no one critic presiding in the way ...”

“... a hackneyed thing’ was one justification, and hackneyed things turn up quite a lot in his work. Cyril Connolly – who, according to Meyers, was once caught stealing the home-grown avocadoes at the Villa Mauresque – wrote persuasively about Maugham’s ‘agitated dullness’ in Enemies of Promise (1938). Long sentence, short sentence, short ...”

“... of every social relationship’. The book was ‘an excellent manual for the hard-boiled’, Cyril Connolly wrote in wary admiration.The star turn in The Wild Body is a grotesque called Bestre, an innkeeper who regards his customers as foes to be humiliated and conducts long campaigns of ‘Bestre-warfare’ against his neighbours. He is an ...”

“... me, even before I considered the enormous ‘Copie’ which was going to form its second part. Cyril Connolly called it a ‘Baedeker of futility’ and listed it as number two in his hundred key books of the Modern Movement. A catalogue of human ignorance and human stupidity, with the two titular characters making the same mistakes over and over ...”