“... was a debonair and melancholy old gentleman in his eighties with a slight, drooping resemblance to Harold Macmillan. Since 1919, he had lived as a ward of psychoanalysis, receiving small retainers from Freud, and then from the Freud Society. An American analyst, Muriel Gardiner, befriended him in 1938, and with great devotion and persistence, managed to ...”

“... the Police Department who specialises in strip-searching delinquent Mexican males, but finds true love in the arms of Big John, a massively-endowed black drug-pusher. There are riots and burning in the barrios, a fixed election, a major kidnapping, and a good old American assassination by a ‘lone crazed killer’ who keeps a picture of Jodie Foster in his ...”

“... of politics and sees hilarity in its tiny events. He knows his subjects (‘James Callaghan, the Harold Wilson of politics’). He knows that Mr Healey is clever, and will therefore lose the argument. And he reminds us that Mr Heseltine is ‘a blonde’. Johnson quotes his namesake, the good Doctor, on taking care to see ‘that the Whig dogs should not ...”

“... was deep and revealing, and Gilmour might with advantage have developed it further. Curzon’s love affair with the East began with his first, post-graduation, tour – of Greece, Palestine and Syria – in which he contrasted the impressively bronzed, handsome, powerfully masculine rural and desert peoples with the degenerate townsmen. It was in the ...”

“... article of all: a piece written by a ‘disaffected and mentally-disturbed’ American called Harold Spencer under the headline, ‘The Forty-Seven Thousand’. Spencer declared that he had seen a book, kept in ‘the Cabinet Noir of a certain German Prince’, containing a list of names compiled by German agents: 47,000 eminent English men and women all ...”

“... of Poundians at least. Critics unimpressed by the psychodrama of Eliot’s Christianity, such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, much prefer Yeats and Stevens. And as a glance at any anthology of 20th-century British poetry will show, the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s ...”

“... magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he ...”

“... In​ 1973, Harold Hering, a decorated Vietnam War rescue pilot, was studying at Vandenberg Air Force Base to become a missile launch officer, a member of an elite group charged with executing the order to launch a nuclear strike. The responsibility was immense, but Hering was persuaded that, at the crew level, there were enough checks and balances to guard against rash behaviour on the part of any individual ...”

“... Ellis Toohey, an indescribably evil left-wing journalist and intellectual, based, it is said, on Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford. Another antagonist is Dominique Francon, the beautiful, rich, super-intelligent heiress who loves him, and thus, for reasons too baroque to go into, spends hundreds of pages marrying his enemies and doing all she can to destroy ...”

“... fiction that the youngsters of military age and their occasional girlfriends, lying around, making love or sleeping in the spacious front rooms, were just hippies, nothing to get upset about. He was a gifted spin artist. I settled, or rather burrowed, into the flat’s wonderfully large back room, and went into total denial. That is, until one afternoon, on ...”

“... into each of his plays is a coded tribute: an MP in Dirty Linen, a clerk in The Invention of Love and two characters in Leopoldstadt are all called Chamberlain, doffing their caps to Stoppard’s long-term assistant, Jacky Chamberlain. He has often thought of writing ‘an autobiography in a parallel world’, imagining his life as it would have been had ...”

“... sympathetic to the Californian fantasy of burial, and the tour de force is also a sober labour of love. This Waugh has affiliations with Richard Boston’s Osbert Lancaster, the portrait of a connoisseur of social oddity who also loved it steadily and whole. Boston is discriminatingly informative about Lancaster’s achievement as artist and cartoonist, and ...”

“... that poems about bulldogs, naiads and country life (‘Out in the country everyone is wise’: Harold Monro), written with Tennysonian fluency in deliberately ‘poetic’ language, wouldn’t do. Brooke, a poet still not properly appreciated, never wholly succumbed to Georgianism – it was Marsh who gave the title ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ to ...”

“... two never quite adjusting to each other. After two marriages and many affairs he fell deeply in love with Jacquetta Hawkes, seeing himself as Bottom the Weaver miraculous adored by Titania. Lewis also found intense happiness in a late marriage, with Joy Davidman, a disciple from America. What he wrote about it is as sincere but unpersuasive as Priestley on ...”

“... November 1969, featuring as its biggest splash an extract from Jacqueline Susann’s new book, The Love Machine. ‘Mr Murdoch has not invented sex,’ the Times sniffed after the first issue, ‘but he does show a remarkable enthusiasm for its benefits to circulation.’ That was understatement. In fact, sex was absolutely central to Lamb’s idea of what he ...”