References in Popular Culture
- Cyril Connolly's name appears in a coda to the Monty Python song "Eric the Half-a-Bee", as a mishearing of the words "semi-carnally". Despite being corrected, the backing vocalists then sing "Cyril Connolly" to the melody of the song. The same comedians made another reference to Connolly in The Brand New Monty Python Bok, which includes a facsimile Penguin paperback, "Norman Henderson's Diary", complete with (invented) praise from Connolly
- The critic and publisher Everard Spruce in Evelyn Waugh’s “Sword of Honour” trilogy is a satire of Connolly
- Ed Spain, “the Captain” in Nancy Mitford’s 1951 novel “The Blessing” is a satire of Connolly
- Michael Nelson’s novel “A Room in Chelsea Square” (1958) is a thinly disguised homosexualised account about Connolly’s time editing “Horizon”
- Elaine Dundy’s novel “The Old Man and Me” (1964) is based on her affair with Connolly
- A film producer in Julian MacLaren-Ross’s 1964 thriller “My Name is Love” is based on Connolly. MacLaren-Ross repeated many of the descriptions verbatim in his later memoir of Connolly
- Connolly is quoted as saying "Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self" in Season 5, Episode 7 of Criminal Minds.
- Since the film A Business Affair (1994) is adapted from Barbara Skelton’s memoirs of her marriage to Cyril Connolly, Jonathan Pryce’s character Alec Bolton in the film is based on Cyril Connolly
- Connolly is also fictionalised in Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. The principal character, eighteen-year-old Briony Tallis, sends the draft of a novella she has written to Horizon magazine and Cyril Connolly is shown as replying at length as to why the novella had to be rejected, apart from explaining to Briony her strong and weak points and also mentioning Elizabeth Bowen.
- Michael Lewis's book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game cites Connolly at the top of the first chapter - "Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising." (Enemies of Promise")
Read more about this topic: Cyril Connolly
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)