“... of money, public adulation and staggering self-belief. ‘I really believe,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, whom he had met at Princeton, that ‘no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation.’ But he was already anticipating his later failure. ‘I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings ...”

“... delay’. In his justly celebrated Arden Shakespeare edition of the play, published in 1982, Harold Jenkins looks at the vast literature that has already appeared on the subject of ‘delay’ in Hamlet, and reminds the reader that many critics have found it an exhausted subject that should be put aside. Ruth Nevo, for example, in 1972 dismissed the ...”

“... to Bloomsbury tastes emerged at Sissinghurst in Kent, where Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, found the remains of a great courtyard house that had once played host to Elizabeth I. It was already in ruins when Horace Walpole saw it in 1752 and all that now survived was one low range of buildings and a single great tower. Restoring it was ...”

“... The fictiveness of the real is a favourite theme with Americans, from Wallace Stevens to Harold Robbins. They are afraid they live in a world they have made up, and made up badly, so that a soap opera, for example, may be seen not as an escape but as a secret verdict, a last metaphor for a bungled invention. Vidal knows this very well, and speaks, in ...”

“... the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth ...”

“... and dogmatic politics’ and as a hindrance to ‘an expression of the public will’. Harold Laski’s Parliamentary Government in England, published in 1938, pleaded for ‘a government that can govern’ and ‘a stable executive with sufficient authority to drive an important and substantial programme through the House of Commons in the ...”

“... research himself. There is an embarrassingly well-written account, rather like an early Angus Wilson story, of a terrible Christmas package holiday in a Bournemouth hotel. As ‘Raban’ and a very temporary ‘Mrs Raban’ consort and occasionally cavort with their culturally ‘dispossessed’ fellow guests one feels much as they must have done, while ...”

“... them, its adversaries should be hugely entertained and encouraged. The old Arch-Druid himself, Mr Harold Macmillan, appeared on television the other night and gave a few lessons on the maintenance of Ancient British solidarity. Tens of thousands of Polish workers on their knees were, he suggested, the right sort of example to follow. That was unity for ...”

“... into her own vision of ‘all this fiddle’, as graceful in her reading of Stevens or Cummings or Harold Monro, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (‘if not purely modern, properly within the new movement’) as in her considered praise of the millionaire poet Scofield Thayer: ‘a new Victorian – reflective, bi-visioned, and rather wilfully ...”

“... thought her more a manager than a leader. Tony Crosland, her chief at education during the first Wilson government, was frustrated by her tendency to get mired in detail. Contrast this with the record of Barbara Castle, Labour’s top woman at a string of second-rank ministries a few years earlier. Like Williams, Castle never held the great offices of ...”

“... on the occasion of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America,’ he writes in a typically despairing passage: The terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own … You have been cast into a race in which the ...”

“... manuscripts were filched. The Shakespeare essays, written over 27 years (the latest, a review of Harold Brooks’s edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, appeared in this paper in October 1979), share these characteristics. The racy manner almost prevents one questioning the confidence with which we are told Shakespeare or the Archbishop of Canterbury would ...”

“... speaks in these lines,’ and so on. Spender was not bashful about building on his success. As Harold Nicolson, who also helped his career, observed: ‘He is absolutely determined to become a leading writer.’ Being a ‘leading writer’, not merely a writer, mattered enormously to the young Spender, and this role required more than just writing. The ...”

“... ship had even left dock: We paraded 85 blocks down 5th ave today and were reviewed by President Wilson. About 75,000 were in line and we were ye star attraction. I was made a sergeant in ye squadron and led the 2nd Platoon out in the middle of the avenue all by myself and saluted Ye Great Woodrow. I felt lonesome. It was a Red Cross march but Hemingway ...”

“... writing about books for the New Yorker and accruing what the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, described as a ‘mountain of indebtedness’. ‘Her Constant Reader,’ he insisted, ‘did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.’Parker approached books in the same way as she had plays. That ...”