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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not just a mockery of it, as is the proleptic and unacknowledged winning entry in that contest, Harold Pinter’s Proust Screenplay, written in 1972 for Joseph Losey, but never filmed: a brilliant, synoptic, allusive evocation of the whole of A la recherche du temps perdu. Völker Schlöndorf’s film Swann in ...”

“... only equalled by the facility with which the reader can gobble it up, and that creates a kind of love relationship, a kind of unthinking happy embrace which I feel to be totally inimical and death to the novel ... and this is why I think in the long run we do have to reject the idea of the traditional novel being all that we can have. I do not mean to say ...”

“... in the Houston arts scene. He was supposed to be completing his degree – he had fallen in love with phenomenology – but there was too much else to do. He founded a university quarterly called Forum, and set about publishing everyone he admired, including Walker Percy, William Gass and the not yet famous Marshall McLuhan. In 1960, he joined the board ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a hanger-on, and played a significant part in getting Barnes’s Nightwood into print. She fell in love and had affairs, mostly, but not always, with men. She was good-looking in those days, a ‘traffic-stopper’, according to Wesley, ‘not strictly beautiful but unforgettable: widely spaced blue eyes, yellow hair, golden complexion, a lovely figure’. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... admiration is Ted Solotaroff’s essay, ‘Silence, Exile and Cunning’ (1970), which antedates Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence by three years. There, Solotaroff shows how the aspiring writer’s mind, locked in the cell of its preconceptions, receives visits from real life, but for the most part gets down to serving the sentence. Flaubert was the ...”

“... during which they sent each other around a thousand letters. ‘My poet, my mistress, my lover! I love you all the ways tonight, but most of all for the grace of your lines,’ Palmer wrote (she had studied classics at Bryn Mawr, and introduced Barney to Sappho). Barney had many other lovers; Souhami recounts that she once boasted of having eighteen different ...”