“... copy: this was the write-up of the disastrously dull car trip from Paris to Peking commissioned by Harold Evans for the Sunday Times in 1978, the year before Perelman died. Though Herrmann mines the essays for evidence of his states of mind over the years, her endeavour is mostly wasted. The Perelmans’ open marriage, in which they were to tolerate each ...”

“... victories, not defeats.’ In his autobiography, Paper Chase, the former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans recounts a formative event of his childhood. It was the summer of 1940. He was 12 and on holiday from Manchester in the North Wales seaside resort of Rhyl. One morning he and his father took a walk along the beach and discovered a scattering of ...”

“... the next war in 1973, and the oil crisis. This had a direct impact on British politics, leading to Harold Wilson’s return to Downing Street in 1974. He resigned two years later in a miasma of dark suspicion, not much brightened by his resignation honours list, with its bizarre collection of mountebanks and crooks. Even that wasn’t quite as strange as The ...”

“... long decline of the Empire and the Cold War, but they haven’t had their memoirs ghost-written by Harold Evans, their consultancy retained by ABC News and their columns syndicated across the qualities. They haven’t been met, at every airport lounge, with an orgy of sycophancy and a chorus of toadying, complicit mirth at every callous, mendacious jest ...”

“... phrase – vaguely venomous, unsupported by evidence)’. On 6 November 1975 he ‘learned that Harold Pinter was incensed when I said on TV a few weeks ago that the English theatre was preoccupied with the minor emotional crises of the urban middle class, and never opened its eyes to analyse society as a whole or the world outside England’. Tynan had ...”

“... loop. He was billed as ‘Daredevil Lindbergh’. A decade later, Lincoln Kirstein’s sister told Harold Nicolson, who was writing a life of Lindbergh’s father-in-law, that but for his pioneering solo flight to Paris Lindbergh would have been in charge of a gas station on the outskirts of St Louis. This sounds like snobbery. Lindbergh’s marriage to Anne ...”

“... directors of the Times were divided by Murdoch, and so failed miserably to intervene when Harold Evans was sacked as editor. Of the five independent directors in the case of the Observer, two are nominated by Lonrho, two by the Observer’s staff, and these four choose a fifth. The two nominated by Lonrho – on the advice of Lord Shawcross (of ...”

“... and the people she met in their living room in New York: Edmund Wilson, James Thurber, Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial ...”

“... that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre in Milan’. The Nicolsons were hardly impoverished – they’d ...”

“... Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James Thurber, but his best friend at the magazine was A.J. Liebling, with ...”

“... Austrian resistance; but he has done little else. Another account of the controversy – Richard Evans’s In Hitler’s Shadow – is better informed, and more perceptive. Professor Evans shows in abundantly documented detail how the arguments the embattled historians are advancing ‘are derived, consciously or ...”

“... from European attempts to cling on to empire. In 1956 there was the debacle of Suez. In 1960 Harold Macmillan recognised the inevitable when he conceded the power of anticolonial liberation movements in his ‘wind of change’ speech.African nationalist intellectuals were by now appropriating the language of civilisation for ...”

“... history have begun to appear, and now they have been joined by a chronological overview from Harold James, a British economic historian who teaches at Princeton. The sober style of his book could not be more different from Manchester’s, and its focus on the technological and economic history of the business is a world away from Manchester’s ...”

“... but without the article it conveys little meaning. The intra-office memo from myself to Harry Evans, then editor of the Sunday Times, and other colleagues at the outstanding paper for which both Derek Humphry and I then worked, has never been published before. At a minimum, the two documents add to the historic record.On the night of 30 January ...”

“... Visiting Forces Act, which mandated police forces to ‘detain and arrest’ absentees. Although Harold Wilson’s government winked at the law, the British police, who generally disliked the Labour Party, enjoyed the easy sport of plucking a deserter – recognisable by his buzzcut – off the street and turning him over to the US military police. In the ...”