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“... not to the baronage: to the exam-passing classes, rather than to the order-giving ones. To use Harold Macmillan’s classification, he was a ‘gownsman’, not a ‘swordsman’. Unfortunately, he did not pass his exams well enough to be a really confident gownsman. He was an Oppidan at Eton, not a Colleger; a closed exhibitioner at King’s, not a ...”

“... Sir Gerald Nabarro once said that without his moustache he might be mistaken for a nobody like Harold Wilson; behind his formidable moustache and haughty stare Kitchener was as scheming and ambitious a self-publicist as ever wore uniform. That poster was his apogee: it might as accurately have been captioned ‘Your Country Needs ME.’ From the moment ...”

“... gave way to a sense of the advantages. For a start the voters might have fallen a little out of love with the idea of electoral reform. Proportional representation is a quick fix to whatever is wrong with the British democratic process. And the unseemly negotiations to fix up this coalition, where party manifestos become pick-and-mix bargaining ...”

“... in distinguished company: Byron refers to ‘Belgium’s capital’ in the third canto of Childe Harold. If Pitt’s career during the last eight years of his life was in decline, he remained the master of the House of Commons. When he sat down in November 1797 after what a contemporary called ‘a most spirited speech to rally opinion’, the whole House ...”

“... who started out as a Cornish scholarship girl and rose to become a senior civil servant under Harold Wilson and Edward Heath and, later, a top executive at breakfast television – has written a memoir of her rise to the top of the British establishment. Sentence by sentence, her story is likeable and impressive but never very exciting to read. Most of ...”

“... because, being mentally as well as physically blind, he did not understand that in their day to love a young man was the equivalent (Socrates’ jokes reveal this more clearly than Plato’s theories) of keeping a dancing-girl before getting married in ours’. One reason homosexuality, in the Christian era, has often been a scourge and misery to people ...”

“... poem by Heine, “Der Asra”’. Fitzgerald’s fourth novel, on the face of it a tragicomedy of love and loss among careworn bosses and dewy office girls at the wartime BBC, resonated, in its author’s mind at least, with a poem in which a Yemeni slave explains how, for the people he comes from, to love is to die. We are ...”

“... so many José Arcadios, even with some Remedios and Amarantas thrown in on the distaff side. Harold Bloom is right to complain of ‘a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is crammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb’. I would add to this an embarrassment the literary commentator is loath to confess, namely ...”

“... Harold Stanley Ede​ , who was known for most of his life as Jim, lived through nearly the whole of the 20th century. Born in 1895, he died in 1990, having, as his modest epitaph in St Peter’s church in Cambridge puts it, ‘created Kettle’s Yard and helped to preserve this church’. Kettle’s Yard, the house and gallery that still holds Ede’s collection of 20th-century art, as well as hosting exhibitions and concerts, is the place where generations of undergraduates, including me and, somewhat later, Laura Freeman, first encountered the work of Miró and David Jones, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Gaudier-Brzeska and others ...”

“... and treason, asserted Abse, is ‘the child’s lack of reconciliation between his hatred and his love of his father’. At this point, if not before, the non sequitur becomes the methodology of the witch-hunt. To take the most salient counter-example, there was nothing ‘queer’ (Tom’s preferred term, by the way) about Kim Philby, who was the most ...”

“... impresario, Mr Sleary, the brandified circus-master, for all his slurred diction: ‘There ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-Interetht, after all.’ There is a photograph of Dr Leavis in this book, to illustrate a paragraph in Time which Hall ‘particularly wanted to record’. Time had alleged that Hall ‘studied English under F.R. Leavis: Even ...”

“... relative to Spain in barbarous mid-winter. Sophia, chaperoned by a maid, must surely have been in love with him, or she would have withdrawn from that appalling journey. He affected to be deeply upset by her death years later. In Sweden, Sicily and Russia he travelled intermittently with the Misses Holland, daughters of a successful physician, but never ...”

“... well-known study of 1959, and also in Vincent Brome’s Havelock Ellis: Philosopher of Love, published last year. But students of biography will particularly welcome Phyllis Grosskurth’s contribution, remembering her last biographical effort with pleasure. Her book on John Addington Symonds, now 16 years old, is one of the genuinely original ...”

“... but for the last 25 years of her life she also shared an apartment on the Upper East Side with Harold Korn, a professor at Columbia University Law School; they married shortly before Clampitt’s death in 1994, of ovarian cancer. In the summers, they spent weeks in Maine, the location of many of Clampitt’s poems of fog, sea and sundews. Salter, in ...”

“... disappearing under the water. All they ever found of her were her flippers.‘Scenes of marital love seem to set up shark attacks particularly well,’ Leanne Shapton writes in Swimming Studies, her memoir from 2012. Earlier in the book, she relates a similar scene from her own life. On New Year’s Eve 2009, newly engaged, she and her partner, James, were ...”