“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It struck him ‘as a dramatic and pretty subject’. Young Lord Stafford, it seemed, was in love with Lady Grosvenor, whom he had known before her marriage, but had now no expectation of being able to marry as her husband was alive and robust. ‘Yielding to family pressure,’ as James put it, ‘he offered his hand to a young, charming, innocent ...”

“... to take bets that resurrection is ruled out. Thirty years ago John Updike gave us in Rabbit Run Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the basketball-player lately wed to tippling slatternly Janice Springer, who failed to cope. When baby Becky drowns through the negligence of Janice, Rabbit runs away. In Rabbit Redux, the title elegantly lifted from Trollope, Rabbit ...”

“... to Vassar, scene of her most commercially successful novel, The Group. After Vassar, she married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring theatrical writer/director; wrote her first pieces for The Nation; underwent the break-up of the marriage; met the Partisan Review people; met Edmund Wilson; and married him. ‘He did not smoke, but after a long and arduous ...”

“... since it provides the only tenuous link among these people. The most officious of the strangers, Harold Chapman (a Docklands property-dealer in his other life) is approached for money with vague menaces by a local peasant family who own a crumbling wall that’s threatening to block the way, and he in turn approaches his various neighbours. So it’s a plot ...”

“... sense of mischief; a romantic temperament which enabled him to enjoy a number of undemanding love affairs; a fellowship of All Souls and, at the age of only 45, the Wardenship. Perhaps this last was the trouble, ‘OUR THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU DURING THIS TRYING TIME. JOHN AND PENELOPE’ read his telegram from the Betjemans when he was elected. Or perhaps ...”

“... at the highest level and are lucky enough to be able to produce an endless stream. We would dearly love to produce bowlers like these, but climate, pitches, the structure of the game, and genetics, are all against it. The lengths we will go to in our quest are illustrated by Woodcock’s mention of a sponsored find-a-fast-bowler competition last year, the ...”

“... could cram from head office cuttings files on the flight out. A British angle is the line editors love the most. Yet strangely no one mentioned the UK’s active encouragement of the massacres of between half a million and a million people which brought Suharto to power in the Sixties. Reporters did not need to go to the Public Record Office to find evidence ...”

“... by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime minister wasn’t inclined to believe the accusations. It turned out that Frolik had never actually met Stonehouse, and there was no evidence that Stonehouse was homosexual. In his ...”

“... was concerned, when Harald harðræði, the giant King of Norway, was killed by his namesake Harold Godwinsson at Stamford Bridge, on 25 September 1066, just 19 days before the Battle of Hastings. In between Lindisfarne and Stamford Bridge, somewhere round the year 870, Iceland was discovered and settled by Scandinavians – according a later account by ...”

“... admiring letters to the Australian Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley. In 1970 the Sun supported Harold Wilson and in 1972 Murdoch’s papers, notably the Australian (a national daily he had founded in 1964), supported Gough Whitlam. There is, though, a psychological and temperamental unity, a commitment to a ‘radicalism’ that forms a thread between his ...”