“... good aimed at by their necessarily public commitment. There is a famous psychoanalytic article by Harold Searles called ‘The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy’, in which he lovingly details all the ways people have of driving each other mad, and then even madder by denying that that is what they are doing. He then asks: what is the profession in ...”

“... on which many liberal-imperialist hopes were still pinned, was a comfort here. So was Harold Wilson’s idea (later taken up by Tony Blair) that Britain’s past imperial experience gave her unique tools and skills that could still be used to solve world problems; Britain was said to possess cultural sensitivities, for example, that the US ...”

“... preoccupation with hunting down moles, ‘agents of influence’ and the like. Newspapers love it, the public are interested, and the whole business is endlessly stoked by the more enfevered spirits of the Right. There is no doubt that this is a compulsion which goes beyond reason: Blunt, after all, had given up his allegiance to Communism by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... so slowly that Bernstein disowned the performance publicly before it began. The unspeakable Harold Schonberg, New York’s most powerful and least subtle music critic, implied that Gould couldn’t play the concerto at the conventional tempo. Gould stuck it out for another couple of years, giving fewer and fewer concerts (he gave only eight in 1963) and ...”

“... for some of the aspirations centred on Prince Henry, yet Charles could not. How far Charles, like Harold Wilson, was handicapped by a ‘lost leader’ myth around him is a question to which the answer is not obvious, but one well worth further thought. Derek Hirst is facing a tougher task than any of the other authors in this sample. He is writing the latest ...”

“... after death is to write it himself. And if he entertains pretensions to prolixity, it helps, as Harold Macmillan was the first to admit, if you own a publishing house as well. This diminished celebration of the recently-departed has been paralleled by a scholarly reaction against biographies of the more distantly-deceased. The Victorians’ confident vigour ...”

“... and custard – outdated as that may now be – and remain loyal to the fast-food they know and love. In Socialism in a Cold Climate one may survey broadly the same battlefield but from a higher vantage-point. This, too, is a collection of essays on the activity of a Labour government in the later 1980s, though it is not the ‘Unauthorised Programme’ one ...”

“... to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely contributed a tiny treatise on ‘The Detail of Biography’. In it, he wrote that ‘I am stirred with envy for the biographer of 2023’ who would ‘gaze upon the detailed domestic appliances of 1923’ and gain insight into the ...”

“... system doles out cheap gongs to underpaid public servants and buys off dissidents – consider Harold Pinter’s recent CH, or David Hare’s K. Conversely, the Royals are happy to benefit from the disrepute into which democratic politics habitually brings itself. This is particularly useful when, as now, politicians’ mendacity and self-interest meets ...”

“... in which the abiding presence across the generations was Woolf. Once again, Cunningham turns Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence into the stuff of fiction. Woolf dictated the text of the characters’ lives in The Hours, just as Whitman does for those in Specimen Days. But now Cunningham has upped the stakes. We do not move, as we did then, from Sussex ...”

“... He complained about his tutors at Oxford. He complained with special vehemence when his uncle Harold, the first Lord Rothermere (Lord Northcliffe had died in 1922, the year King graduated), declined to give him the important job in newspapers that he felt was his due. Instead Rothermere sent him to Scotland to learn the ropes on the Glasgow Record and the ...”

“... Horror’s latex zombies. It poses a problem, as if exempt from Anglo-Saxons’ flippancy and love of diminuendo that, sensibly enough, cut moral grandiosity down to size. Not that the boulevard press has any trouble speaking in both tongues, often at the same time. The child killers of James Bulger are ‘evil’, as of course are paedophiles; maybe ...”

“... were failures, that Labour never managed to become ‘the natural party of government’ as Harold Wilson wished, and that this was reflected in its failure ever to get elected for two full terms. Traumatised by four successive defeats, Blair wanted above all to make Labour electable and then to secure those two full terms. This would demonstrate that ...”

“... took Marlon into her family: that meant her brother, the actor Luther Adler; her second husband, Harold Clurman, a leader of the Group Theatre, and Stella’s daughter from a previous marriage, Ellen, who was three years younger than Marlon. She and Marlon became lifelong friends, and they were lovers over the years (this is tactfully handled by Mann just ...”