“... funny woman in Hollywood’, who made Ball look like ‘a mortician’ by comparison. Harold Arlen, who composed the music for ‘Over the Rainbow’, said that while the rest of the cast ‘come off excellently, she alone shines’. Because she elevated almost everything she was in, it can be hard to recognise how bad most of the films MGM put ...”

“... in media scapegoating. Heath called the ‘Who governs Britain?’ general election, and lost. Harold Wilson’s Labour government then pushed the unions into a policy of supposedly voluntary wage restraint with the Social Contract, while continuing to let unemployment rise and living standards fall. People were ‘once again bemused and confused by the ...”

“... of mass-market independent thought in America with enough money to let Doc loose. The late editor Harold Hayes, who navigated Esquire’s editorial department through the Sixties and early Seventies, made the monthly periodical into a great American magazine because he refused to allow his editors and writers to perceive any issue as taboo. Every outlaw and ...”

“... long decline of the Empire and the Cold War, but they haven’t had their memoirs ghost-written by Harold Evans, their consultancy retained by ABC News and their columns syndicated across the qualities. They haven’t been met, at every airport lounge, with an orgy of sycophancy and a chorus of toadying, complicit mirth at every callous, mendacious jest ...”

“... But anyone looking for the full range of post-war US poetry will have to turn elsewhere. Sharing Harold Bloom’s commitment to ‘the transcendental strain’, Vendler differs over how we should read it. What she values is less the Sublime than its epistemology. While Bloom cries up the heroic Emersonian in Stevens, Vendler attends to the Kantism of his ...”

“... the historian of modern Wales): its emphasis on the Party’s Welsh component (Mabon, Noah Ablett, James Griffiths, Aneurin Bevan). Morgan also has a sharp eye for important or significant but neglected figures. How right he is, for example, to see the career of the political scientist Harold Laski as one of ‘intense and ...”

“... to Arms. The desire for combat is paramount. ‘Not everyone feels such things so intensely,’ James Fenton writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition of the Collected Stories. Many are simply relieved not to have to fight. But the real test for someone of Hemingway’s cast of mind is: to serve in war as a soldier under military ...”

“... possible for immigrant Europeans – first the Irish and then the Jews – to pass. Rogin quotes James Baldwin: ‘No one was white before he/she came to America.’ It is customary to derive American movies from the low comedy and ethnic knockabout of late 19th-century vaudeville, as well as the mishmash of spectacular attractions that characterised staged ...”

“... must be a history of misreadings’ uncannily echoes the insistence of their successor at Yale, Harold Bloom, that criticism and poetry alike depend on ‘creative misunderstanding’. Yet given The Anxiety of Influence’s lofty indifference to the mechanics of bibliographical transmission, it’s characteristically mischievous for McKenzie to substitute ...”

“... writing about books for the New Yorker and accruing what the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, described as a ‘mountain of indebtedness’. ‘Her Constant Reader,’ he insisted, ‘did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.’Parker approached books in the same way as she had plays. That ...”

“... The vessel was the bark Endeavour; the commander was the bluff, 39-year-old Yorkshireman James Cook, who was also an able astronomer. No one had thought to add natural history to the workload, but Banks got wind of the plan and thrust himself forward. He secured his place on the Endeavour by pulling strings – Lord Sandwich, a former first lord of ...”

“... part is the Irish word dáire, meaning ‘wooded island’. The London prefix dates from 1613 when James 1 granted a charter to the Society of Governors and Assistants, London, of the New Plantation of Ulster, known then and now as the Honourable The Irish Society. The Hon. The Irish Society was strictly a business proposition, like the East India Company, and ...”

“... sectarian theories and practices.The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics ...”

“... faith and becoming a sort of caricature of the Tory squire. In the Seventies this changed sharply. Harold Macmillan’s alleged retort on seeing the first Thatcher Cabinet list – ‘there are more Old Estonians than Old Etonians in this government’ – must have been symptomatic of what many Old Guard Tories felt. There was a record Jewish presence not ...”

“... poems, and one’s self, will just be better or worse instances of familiar types. This is what Harold Bloom calls ‘the strong poet’s anxiety of influence’, his or her ‘horror of finding oneself to be only a copy or a replica’. On this reading of Larkin’s poem, what would it be to have succeeded in tracing home the ‘blind impress’ which all ...”