“... 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 ...”

“... on A.E. Housman as a classical scholar or his influential meditation on ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’. In 1940 he published To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, his account of the revolutionary tradition from Michelet through Marx and up to the Bolsheviks. This may look like the one among his works that was wholly ...”

“... earlier positions appear almost unrecognisable. Who, for instance, said the following in 1962 of Harold Macmillan’s stated wish to make Britain a member of the European institutions that had been created by the Treaty of Rome? ‘We must be clear: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for ...”

“... to be sure, was self-inflicted: while a few of his fellow Etonians (Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton) were bursting precociously into print, Orwell chose to slave away in Parisian kitchens even when he was coughing up blood, sleep in dosshouses while cadging the odd ten shillings off his bemused parents, put in a spot of portering at ...”

“... specialised, high-demand skills – whether tech entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, LeBron James or Jerry Seinfeld – could leverage their assets, market globally, and amass more wealth than any group in human history. But for ordinary workers, capital mobility and automation meant an ever-weakening bargaining position. Manufacturing towns lost their ...”

“... characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy tyrant. This view ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... left (communists, Trots) and the ‘legitimate’ left, which presumably refers to such groups as James Maxton’s ILP (before it gave up on the Labour Party and disaffiliated), Tony Benn and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, and Bevan and his Bevanites. This elicits the slightly alarming thought that if Bevan had ever become leader, he might have ...”

“... book?’). Chris tries her best with Charlotte Stant and Maggie Verver, but chirruping about Henry James novels isn’t really what she’s all about. ‘The Dumb Cunt’ is more her style, ‘a factory of emotions’; her passion has sent her back into adolescence, ‘hunched up in a leather jacket’, listening to the Ramones. She’s creeped out ...”

“... was down to his last three shillings. The turning point came one sunny morning when a man called Harold Taylor called while Coppard was up in his bedroom, ‘not entertaining a lady … but just stitching at my trousers, and they being the only pair I had not got them on’. Taylor was about to launch the Golden Cockerel Press and – when Coppard, now in ...”

“... gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller was tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon and (a friend who was not a ...”

“... read Rorty, we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we may with Harold Bloom, we can’t escape his influence. Anyway, the goal posts are contingent, and an irritable reaching after fact and reason, like Gellner’s, is doomed from the start. Thus Leo Bersani shuns ‘verification’ and finds in late Freud a discourse which ...”

“... Brilliant and mercurial, he had charmed Hoover, who dined several times at his house, and mentored James Angleton, the future CIA head of counterintelligence. As Allen Dulles later said, Philby had the keys to the CIA safe. An internal investigation was inconclusive. He was asked to tender his resignation and, according to his highly unreliable ...”

“... as well as Shoshana Felman and Barbara Johnson), but also linked to other Yale critics, notably Harold Bloom, Peter Brooks, Geoffrey Hartman and Fredric Jameson. In the decades since then, Miller’s work has continued to evolve, often along paths marked out by Derrida. (Derrida moved from Yale to Irvine in California when Miller moved there in the ...”

“... as she and her heroine doggedly churn through the possibilities. The writers of Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin (Ramis also directed), made it more or less the basis of their film. Bill Murray’s Phil is a sour narcissist trapped in a recurring day, able to act without restraint but knowing that he’ll wake up on the second of February again ...”