Party in the Blitz by Elis Canetti
Published more than a decade after his death. His notes on life in England as a refugee during WW2 and after. He was Jewish intellectual, fled from Vienna in 1938.
Talks of people well known and unknown, from Iris Murdoch on down (or up as your taste may be). He moves in circles where he encounters little Bertie Russell and the great Vaughn Williams. And his loathing of T. S. Eliot is paramount.
"The worst of England is the desiccation, the life as a remote-controlled mummy."
"For the Englishman, calm and self-control are the only legitimate ways of getting throiugh life...The protection of the person, its solidity and security is not an easy matter. How much of that distance has remained in English life?"
During the worst of the Blitz, when German invasion was expected:
"What most deeply impressed me was the time of the catastrophes: when England was all alone, and battleships were being sunk....Sometimes sentences were spoken. Expressing contempuous courage. Never, not once, did I overhear an anxiety, or even a complaint. The worse things stood, the more determined people were....The unequal nature of the fight was common knowledge at the time..."
Bertrand Russell had written a book about his visit to China, and many years later Canetti witnesses a talk between Russell and Mr. Pannikar, Indian abbassador to China and a historian. Russell began asking questions.
"It was the most exhuastive interrogation I have ever witnessed. The dialogue came think and fast, Pannikar was no less quick on his feet than his interlocutor. In the space of twenty minutes, provided you paid attention, and did not allow yourself to be distracted, you learned more than you could have done from reading a thick tome [love that word!]. The questions overlapped and, in the most extraordinary way, light was shed on matters that were not explicitly talked about. These things were so illuminated by what was said before and afterwards, that you could swear you had heard them talked about."
So from intellectual calisthentics to bedroom gossip, 
this book covers the literary and academic elite of a time past. Good reading.
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