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“... Cyril Connolly is famous now, and was famous in his lifetime, for not having written a masterpiece. A peculiar sort of fame: after all, many thousands of literary persons share the same distinction. Connolly, though, made a career out of insisting that his failure had a special poignancy, a poignancy which we should all attend to ...”

“... His friends used to say that Cyril Connolly had been sent into the world for one purpose: to be talked about. He was an object of fascination to everyone who knew him. It was not exactly that he was a legend, or that there was anything romantic or Byronic about him. Though his funny face had great charm he was the reverse of handsome: John Sparrow, in one of his feline mots, remarked that ‘the trouble with Cyril is that he is not so beautiful as he looks ...”

“... Unlike the publication in 1975 of the touching acute letters of Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston, the publication of Connolly’s Journal (1928-1937) does not serve him, except right. He found D.H. Lawrence insufficiently magnanimous (‘Notice how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F ...”

“... some genial padding, and the whole thing is good fun, stylishly written and altogether civilised. Cyril Connolly is famous for having wanted to be the author of a totally civilised stylish masterpiece. In all the circumstances such a production would have to be a novel, a genre for which his gifts do not appear to have been ideally suited. He worked at ...”

“... You must explain to me why Cyril wants Barbara,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming in September 1955, a year after Barbara Skelton’s marriage to Cyril Connolly had formally ended. ‘It’s not as though she were rich or a good housekeeper or the mother of his children ...”

“... how much he will give me for them.’ Literary jackals abound. Waugh warns that Cyril Connolly is ‘up to something rather fishy in collecting letters, I think for sale in America. Be wary! There is a nice nest egg for us all in our senility in our correspondence. American Universities are buying them at extravagant prices.’ It is an ...”

“... in 1939, with the author, not uncharacteristically, on a French holiday with a girlfriend and Cyril Connolly, in the course of which Mr Quennell and his nameless companion were stoned in a small provincial town for their immodesty. It was to be the last such excursion for many years, the onset of war soon finding Mr Quennell, confessedly slothful and ...”

“... to infer that this person is now at hand. Shelden did a satisfactory job in his first book, about Cyril Connolly and Horizon, but Orwell is an altogether more substantial, and more difficult, subject. Biographers of ordinary competence, if allowed to quote, cannot hope to avoid the contrast between the way they write and the way Orwell writes. Shelden ...”

“... in it even though some of them have become as obscure as Maclaren-Ross himself. Chief of them is Cyril Connolly, once the centre of what was called Bohemia. I wonder whether anyone still remembers him. Cyril wrote The Rock Pool, a novel highly praised: but I doubt whether a conscientious historian anxious to recapture ...”

“... to have little time for home-front ironists like Henry Reed or look-the-other-way aesthetes like Cyril Connolly or Osbert Sitwell. As it turns out, and this is a paradox that runs throughout the book, his hostility to America’s ‘unironic’ temper, to its earnestness and sentimentality, is of such depth and ferocity that it leads him to over-value ...”

“... Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first novel, Dusty Answer, which shed a little ...”

“... literary life in Britain during the Second World War; the contributors included John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly. The show was stolen, however, by a figure in a voluminous overcoat and dark glasses, whose recollections were delivered slowly, deadpan, between puffs on a large cigar. A month later, at the age of 52, Julian Maclaren-Ross died of a heart ...”

“... In a letter to Cyril Connolly in 1948 Evelyn Waugh listed the ideas that had been in his mind when he was at work on The Loved One: immediately after ‘over-excitement with the scene at Forest Lawn’ came ‘The Anglo-American impasse. Never the twain shall meet.’ Not a new thought even thirty years ago, but, though we may run into one another occasionally in the corridors of the Humanity Research Center of the University of Texas (their territory), or share a train compartment on the way to Combe Florey (ours), it still holds good for those in the Waugh industry ...”

“... their agents and publishers? There’s only one thing for it: open the book up and start reading (Cyril Connolly thought that scanning the first page of a novel was enough to decide whether or not it was going to be any good). Franzen’s willingness to give a junior colleague a leg-up is surpassed only by that of Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee and Thomas ...”

“... are published which are of interest outside the universities. Take novels. Seventy years ago, Cyril Connolly described the reviewing of novels as ‘the white man’s grave of journalism’: ‘for each scant clearing made wearily among the springing vegetation,’ he moaned, ‘the jungle overnight encroaches twice as far.’ The jungle has now ...”