“... and hit him on the forehead. When I arrived at Westminster, the headmaster was the Reverend Harold Costley-White. He was a large, extremely handsome man, silver-haired, highly mellifluous, somewhere between a bishop and a general risen from the cavalry, and altogether lacking in any sense of the absurd. He announced the death of King George V as ...”

“... black music shown by Jewish popular composers – Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Harold Arlen (as well as Benny Goodman, the white King of Swing) – was undeniably strong. Mark Slobin, who has written several invaluable accounts of Jewish music in America, points out that, in addition to Jolson, virtually every major Jewish-American ...”

“... he said. ‘My grand tour shall be one round the whole globe.’) At Eton, he had discovered a love of botany (as one does). He followed Linnaeus’s new programme of systematic classification; and he looked for ways to spend a lot of time exploring and collecting plants. Around 1766, an opportunity presented itself that would allow Banks to combine heroic ...”

“... absconding mother until her daughter cried. ‘I don’t think those policemen understood that I love my family very, very much, but that I needed time to escape,’ Emecheta wrote in her autobiography, Head above Water, which was published in 1986 when she was 41, already the author of ten novels and the mother of five children. ‘If not, I would have ...”

“... over so much time, that perhaps everyone has read a different John Updike. I began from a place of love, the charmed garden of his early novels, stories and critical essays. I read Rabbit, Run when I was 12 with a sense of accumulating speed and transport I have rarely felt since, though a confusion about what exactly Rabbit was doing to Janice’s ass in that ...”

“... 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 ...”