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“... of the crisis of Utopianism can be found in the latest novel by a veteran of Science Fiction, Harry Harrison’s Rebel in Time. Where George Turner ventures into the future for an experimental re-creation of mid-20th-century warfare, Harrison exploits that valuable generic resource, the time machine, in order to ...”

“... and sells in time, tries for one girl but, in a rich man’s yachting swop, draws another, Thelma Harrison, who, unnervingly, loves him.* That brings us to the start of Rabbit at Rest and represents the barest narrative bones. Sex plus money, plus a slick of current events, plus the small-town scene: the casual impulse may be to expect the least – a soap, a ...”

“... If​ his English teacher hadn’t been so snootily discouraging, it’s unlikely that Tony Harrison would have gone on to write as much as he has: by my calculation, 13 plays, 11 films and twenty or more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose ...”

“... your life away! Of all my muses it was she first taught me to love fruitility. English Opera Sir Harry Sir Gawain ...”

“... As​ a child, Debbie Harry was always searching for ‘the perfect taste’. She couldn’t describe it, but knew she’d know it if she found it. ‘Sometimes, I got a hint of it in peanut butter. Other times … when I drank milk. It was maddening because I was driven to have it.’ She never ate anything, she writes, without wondering if she was at last about to get ‘the flavour of complete satisfaction ...”

“... cocaine etc. Three years later, importation of smoking-opium was proscribed. Then, in 1914, the Harrison Act made opiates and other narcotics legally available only on prescription and for the treatment of disease. The Supreme Court ruled that supplying addicts with prescriptions for narcotics was illegal under the Act – contraventions led to some 25,000 ...”

“... home? Answering the pulls and torsions of that question produces much of the verse of Heaney, Harrison and Dunn, but it also produces very different kinds of poetry. Martianism had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest. Surely Martianism comes from the ‘Ithaca’ section of ...”

“... lace was made and so forth aren’t often disclosed, though we are given a deconstructive bio of Harrison Ford’s outfit as Indiana Jones. We also learn that when there was a shortage in the supply of peacock feathers for Hedy Lamarr’s train in Delilah, Cecil B. DeMille announced that he happened to own a peacock ranch. But costumes aren’t the same as ...”

“... are idle fiction. The myth of Robin Hood was well established by the time the sparkish Prince Harry, the future Henry V, was engaged in mischievous highway robberies, possibly little more than royal horseplay, along with that other ‘gentleman robber’ Falstaff (as unreliably described in Shakespeare’s Henry IV). Spraggs, surprisingly, rates Prince ...”

“... soul, to taste the waters in which we all must swim out to the light.’ A hundred pages later, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom’s son, Nelson, will reflect: ‘and it was lovely to have a woman’s head down there, all that hair under your hands, the tips of her ears and back of her neck, you can’t see her face but her shoulders tense up when you ...”

“... anthem ‘Wake Up’. But it isn’t all CGI, yet, at reality’s interface with illusion. Harry Potter, for example, nips into a sanctuary of rather more traditional design to place a call to the Ministry of Magic. J.K. Rowling has enough respect for folk memory to register his surprise that the phone actually works. A lot depends on genre. ‘Don’t ...”

“... San Francisco, Cage found himself part of a thriving musical avant-garde that included Cowell, Lou Harrison (who shared his interest in unusual percussion), the micro-tonal composer and vagabond Harry Partch, and the prolific symphonist Alan Hovhaness. He also met Moholy-Nagy, who invited him to teach a course at his New ...”

“... relief when at last they allowed themselves to break up (‘I’m not a Beatle any more!’ George Harrison is said to have cried delightedly after their last public appearance), and left one wondering how they had managed to stay together so long. Dick Heckstall-Smith defines a band as ‘a passengerless collective’, but he doesn’t say ...”

“... In a chapter on animals in his Description of England, the Elizabethan antiquary William Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the king had had all the mastiffs in England put to death because ‘they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereigne ...”

“... McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story ...”