“... activity inflicts. Moreover, in recent years such environmental scientists as Paul Ehrlich, Edward Wilson and, most recently, Gretchen Daily, Harold Mooney and Walter Reid, have spoken out while taking far greater care with details and qualifications than Diamond appears to believe is necessary. The more important reason why ...”

“... he banned them from theatres. When Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms came to New York in October, Harold Edel, the manager of the Strand Theatre, wrote: ‘We think it a most wonderful appreciation of Shoulder Arms that people should veritably take their lives in their hands to see it.’ Edel was dead within a week, of flu.Although there was no effective ...”

“... in the newly independent Algerian parliament; Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of West Germany; Harold Wilson, on the eve of his first term as prime minister; and François Mitterrand, who as minister of justice approved the execution of at least forty Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by ...”

“... of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, still in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David ...”

“... clear. She shut the pits and she shut the shipyard.’ (In fact, the shipyard closed in 1975, when Harold Wilson was in power.) But he went on to say that he looked on her more kindly now. ‘She might have done it for a good reason. I’m starting to think that way in me older days and becoming a bit more of a capitalist myself.’ At the same time, he ...”

“... visible means of support. Imitation and room at the top eventually produced that trade-off which Harold Perkin memorably called the ‘viable class society’, class without ruinous conflict. The Victorian compromise, Wiener asserts, lasted right up to the present. And so the work ethic was washed down in a bumper of roses and wine. In outline this is of ...”

“... says, is ‘self-glorifying pantaloon’: ‘At the same table as David Hockney, Philip Roth, Harold Pinter and Sir Isaiah Berlin, it was flattering to be treated like one of the boys.’ We sometimes meet the man who’s concerned to share unflattering truths about himself – admissions, mostly, of getting over-accustomed to having teams of assistants ...”

“... lectures was given by, among others, T.S. Eliot, J.C. Squire, Laurence Binyon, Helen Waddell and Harold Monro. The money was spent on black and white marble, to replace Street’s ‘ugly tiles’ and ‘18th-century chairs of good design’ to replace his pews in the chancel. The new plan is to remove the marble flooring, put the reredos back in the apse ...”

“... age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port with ...”

“... performative, grunting exercises: ‘This week, reading Joyce Carol Oates’s gruesome story after Harold Brodkey’s maundering about Brando was like a chocolate sundae on top of a banana split.’Along with the big-name, high-price blowhards were some specimens of nouveau riff-raff that Brown had hauled over from Vanity Fair. To Michael Arlen, the New ...”

“... writer’. Charles Dickens would certainly qualify – but what about Fanny Craddock and Harold Robbins? The less fastidious literary critic customarily cuts through this problem by a brutal triage. Commonest is some variant of Raymond Escarpit’s notion of separate cultural ‘circuits’ or Queenie Leavis’s more homely stratification into ...”

“... previously misidentified problems sometimes makes his own study more reminiscent of J. Dover Wilson’s What Happens in ‘Hamlet’? (1935). Although Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness contains various disclaimers to the effect that Lewis really does understand that Hamlet is a play (or rather a piece of ‘poetic drama’, which for him usually seems to ...”

“... season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic ...”

“... Greatest Era’, with its individual portraits of Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Langdon and Harold Lloyd. What moves Agee most about the silent comedians is their capture of a chivalry and a gentleness amazingly suited to the rhythms of modern life: In A Night Out Chaplin, passed out, is hauled along the sidewalk by the scruff of his coat by staggering ...”

“... your lamp, there citron to nibbleAnd coffee dribble … Frost is in the stubble.Then came Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Flaubert’s Politics’, which ends with this sentence: ‘As the first big cracks begin to show in the structure of the 19th century, [Flaubert] shifts his complaint to the shortcomings of humanity, for he is unable to believe in, or even to ...”