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“... Why does every home not have a whole wall of encyclopedias, now that we supposedly live in the Information Age? Why have they failed to establish themselves as indispensable items of furniture, against the competition of electronic gadgetry? Because they are contenting themselves with just giving information, instead of sharpening it, so that it points somewhere ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... evenings drinking kava and talking politics. In an attempt to draw them in, a church elder called Cyril ruled that men were not to be criticised for drinking kava and were welcome to join services at the weekends when it suited them better. The revival would enable them to continue ‘doing great things’, Bratrud writes. ‘One of those great things was ...”

“... The Wigmore Hall has inaugurated a season of concerts on a Sunday morning which conclude with a glass of sherry for free. One Sunday recently I heard a Beethoven string septet which was new to me and very acceptable. The City Music Society causes me more difficulties. The Society concerts are given at the Bishopsgate Institute on a Tuesday morning. I am the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 odd ...”

“... He would, unfortunately, drink a great deal when writing, and even secreted a bottle to top up his glass en route to the lavatory. Why, then, did he turn, not only against his father, but, with one exception, against the whole Nichols family? According to his brother, he was a much-indulged and happy boy: why did he describe his childhood as that of a ...”

“... In 1852, the 24-year-old Margaret Wilson married her cousin Frank Oliphant, an artist in stained glass. Over the next seven years, her mother, three of her children and her husband died. He knew that he had advanced tuberculosis, but did not think Margaret strong enough to be told. The widow was left penniless in Rome, with two small children and one on the ...”

“... out. He also established a wine museum at Mouton, not the usual mouldering old presses and dusty glass cases full of corks and tasters, but a beautiful pleasure dome filled with works of art connected with wine. During the war he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined ...”

“... of a Naked Girl’; ‘What a Great Man Learned about Reflection and Emotion’; ‘Aggressive Glass and Mirrors’. Really, they could be the names of songs: ‘Oh, Darling I’m in the Garden’; ‘It Can Take Years to Remain’; ‘Nancy Weak’; ‘Vicky Swanky Was a Beauty’. When a writer aspires to be a musician, she violates the basic terms of ...”

“... waiting for it to start again, or louder. A door sort of slammed; the back door – I heard the glass shake. – Francis? – What? – That’s what it’s like every night.    He said nothing. – It’s like that every night, I said ... – It’s only talking, he said. – It’s not. – It is. – It’s not; they’re shouting. Paddy Clarke ...”

“... and other poems on fairy mythology; his first serious income as an artist came from the stained glass windows he began to design for James Powell and Sons in the late 1850s. He turned out hundreds of such designs over the course of his working life, most of them for Morris & Co. In a frenzy of mourning after Morris’s death in 1896, he ‘flew at his ...”

“... Her first book was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and among those who admired her work were Cyril Connolly and Al Alvarez. Edward Lucie-Smith included her in British Poetry since 1945 (1970) and Larkin put her in his Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse (1973). The living afterlife of her next forty years uncannily resembles that of Lynette ...”

“... drinking tea in the attendant’s room of public lavatories, scratching at the white painted glass to get a better look at the courtships taking place on the other side: some officers were said to take an ‘unhealthy’ interest in their work and were themselves arrested for importuning. Cottaging, like gardening, seems to have brought together a ...”