In his his 1991 Autobiography, Kingsley Amis recalled “a small group of posh chaps,” the literary critics who exercised undue sway over London writers of the 1950s: “They were second-generation Blooms-buryites, I suppose, junior and dilute modernists . . . men of small original output and uncertain taste, owing their position to other things than knowledge or merit. Connolly, the best known, seemed to me the least deserving.”
Nor were others much fonder of Cyril Connolly. Within five days of their wedding, his second wife Barbara Skelton felt “very restive and dissatisfied, saddled with a slothful whale of a husband who spends his time soaking in the bath and then . . . studies the racing form.” This was a man who stole his friends’ books and was given to moaning about those of his dead friends who didn’t bequeath him any of their money or real estate The London wit Molly MacCarthy described him as “mean with his own money and perpetually extravagant with everyone else’s.”
