“... Graham Greene was more than half in love with easeful failure. He chose to end A Sort of Life, the sly memoir of his early years that stood in for an autobiography, with ‘the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel’, adding the characteristic gloss that ‘failure too is a kind of death’ and so may conclude the story of a life as appropriately as one’s last breath ...”

“... my life’, as a loveless matter of money. Johnson himself declared it, according to Boswell, a ‘love marriage on both sides’. Tetty spent her last years largely bedridden and in a haze of opium and alcohol: for Nokes she exemplifies the human vanities Johnson dissected in the Rambler. The publication of the Dictionary marked a watershed in Johnson’s ...”

“... they would show up at the offices, usually to drop something off: a story, or a poem, or a love letter, or a rant, or an obsessively meticulous rendering of an obsessively meticulous New Yorker cover by Jenny Oliver – or most common of all, a confession. In those days, the New Yorker was also a kind of Miss Lonelyhearts. At first, I had thought that ...”

“... mix of forthrightness and equivocation. Wyler’s film, highly unusually, uses a disabled person, Harold Russell, in a major role. For once, disablement in the movies is a matter of visible absence rather than disguised presence, unlike Lon Chaney’s strapped-up legs visible in profile in The Penalty (1920), or Spencer Tracy’s theoretically missing arm ...”

“... nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he couldn’t catch his glittering eye. There is only one passage in ...”

“... the villain within a hero by turning, for instance, Tony Blair MP into ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ or Harold Wilson into ‘Lord Loinwash’. He gives my edition of the Sonnets some genial stick for emphasising their oral and performative aspects (I was just trying to get people to read them), rather than dwelling on how their letters dance into different visible ...”

“... time been 16, and pregnant. Babalola had taken her home, lent her to his friends, then fallen in love with her, and married her. Janet does not feature extensively in Adah’s story; she is there primarily as an image of a person in a phone box. Her introduction into it opens that story out: to new dangers, but also to the potential for change, in Adah and ...”

“... Boy, which he shot in one take. ‘From the first day on I hadn’t a doubt that I was going to love working in the movies. I did not even ask what I’d be paid to work in Arbuckle’s slapstick comedies. I didn’t much care,’ Keaton said. He went on: ‘I’d fallen in love with the movies – with the cameras, with ...”

“... was met by progressively more invasive medical procedures. Too much treatment and not enough love eventually killed him, about as unpleasantly as could be imagined. The authors discuss this case, not as an isolated if appalling error of judgment, but as a symptom of a much deeper failing in the medical profession. The quest for certainty: more tests mean ...”

“... By the end of his time at the university he had camouflaged his origins sufficiently to fool Harold Laski, who suggested that he go into social work to get to know the working class. The present, and last, volume of Glasser’s autobiography covers his post-Oxford, post-war years. It begins with his marriage to an anti-semitic middle-class English ...”

“... college.’ She was already (McCarthy, that is) shacking up at weekends with actor and dramatist Harold Johnsrud in New York, a sign of sophistication way beyond most of her socially smarter peers in the class of ’33. (She had ‘no family ... to please’, one of them pointed out thirty years later, when The Group revived the gossip: ‘She appeared to be ...”

“... meant more than beauty, opulence was preferred to taste, and wealth mattered more than lineage. Harold Nicolson explained: Edwardians were vulgar to a degree. They lacked style. They possessed only the hard glitter of their own electric light: a light which beat down pitilessly upon courtier, ptarmigan, bridge scores, little enamel boxes and plates of ...”

“... for his first book, A Boy’s Will, which appeared early in 1913. He attended the opening of Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, where he met F.S. Flint, who sent him a book of his poems. The poetry was, in Pritchard’s phrase, ‘rich in inexpressible yearnings’ – the sort of writing Frost could not abide. He nonetheless found a way to ...”

“... stand for election to the Shadow Cabinet, and came sixth. Foot proved such a source of strength to Harold Wilson that in January 1972 he was promoted to Shadow Leader of the House with special responsibilities for fighting the Government over the Common Market. After Labour’s return to power in October 1974, Foot was first Employment Secretary under ...”

“... the songs of the saved. Or might, as Geoffrey Hill puts it, ‘harmonise strangely with the divine/Love’. The publication of Hill’s Collected Poems illustrates how consistently he has worried at the problem of how far poetic beauty can ‘suspend’ or redeem the weight of moral and political judgment. The question that has polarised his critics is whether ...”