“... 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 ...”

“... true spiritual revolution after the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Paul de Man see something profoundly representative in Wordsworth’s sudden retreat from the public to the private sphere – the threshold of modernity, the moment when the political and social goals of history become either ...”

“... a runic inscription: ‘Here sails the Sea-Brave (hafdjarfr).’ Viking ships were works of love as well as art. Ships and buildings, then, but also, on page after page and throughout the exhibition, hoards and weapons: axes, spearheads, swords and shields, helmets and ring mail. The smith clearly took as much pride in his work as the carpenter. The ...”

“... guillotine, or his liking for Simenon’s novels, with Inspector Maigret imperturbably dissecting love and lust behind the net curtains of Paris. In The End of the Line (1997), which was completed days before his death, he implicitly connects his insights into the 1790s with his own recollections of the febrile atmosphere in Paris in the late 1930s, days of ...”

“... from kung fu movies and Oprah Winfrey.’ Wright introduces us to a cast that includes Corporal Harold James Trombley, a 19-year-old who sits in the back of a Humvee ‘waiting all day for permission to fire his machine gun’. And when he does fire, the thrill of the fight represents a kind of ecstasy for him. Wright reports that ‘every time’ Trombley ...”

“... cites a 1954 opinion poll which asked French women what they wanted out of life: 22 per cent said love and 54 per cent ‘material wellbeing’. Left-wing European intellectuals worried openly that American consumerism was undermining European civilisation and drowning it in a wave of Coca-Cola and rock’n’roll. American sociologists decried the dumbing ...”

“... Beckett (who had his own concept of inner space), and nothing at all about contemporaries such as Harold Pinter, Christine Brooke-Rose or B.S. Johnson. (Johnson does make a brief appearance in Miracles of Life, where he’s described as ‘a thoroughly unpleasant figure who treated his sweet wife abominably [and] was forever telephoning me and buttonholing me ...”

“... to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal healthcare and alternative medicine, our love of fresh air and our passion for sport.’The majority of deaths came in the three months between September and December 1918. The war probably didn’t spawn it, but certainly helped it spread: the US lost more soldiers to flu than to the war in part ...”

“... romantic poets who couldn’t play games. Keats, I suppose, was pre-eminent. You know, ‘half in love with easeful death’ –So it was through poetry that you became bookish. Not fiction?No, not at all.Keats became quite big for me too, but first I had to go through miles of prose – everything – Biggles etc.Those sorts of thing did figure later, or ...”

“... tormented), living in a forest or by the sea or in any event in romantic isolation (the alibi of love), Genet was picturing the gaudy homosexual ghetto of Montmartre, without alibis or medical aetiology, and was delineating gay friendships and rivalries and inventing the drag queen for French literature. ‘But why would you want to reduce a great writer ...”