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“... One of the early chapters in Harold Brodkey’s first novel The Runaway Soul is entitled ‘The River’. The narrator, after his father’s death, returns to a landscape which he had known in early childhood. Some of the prose is plain and clear: ‘At the mouth of the stream, where it emptied into the inlet, under willows, lay a very large, ungainly river dinghy ...”

“... that morning was of German professional competence and decent seriousness and British self-love and exhibitionism. Not everyone has admired Lord Hailsham as he unquestionably admires himself. The tone is beautifully echoed in Hailsham’s account of his meeting with Khrushchev. ‘Khrushchev was a countryman to his fingertips. The only man I have met ...”

“... Either you love the jokes or you don’t, with the Mitfords. The biting, ferocious ‘teases’, the flippancy, the apparent inability to take anything particularly seriously, are everything, not least because they encapsulate all that used to be good about Englishness, and all that is grotesque also. The jokes, always cruel, both charm and repel; without them, you’re left with girls in pearls living borderline tragic lives, or with the po-faced, lumpen Unity Mitford – galumph, galumph – who, unlike her five sisters (in descending order: Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Decca, Debo; there was also a brother, Tom), had little talent for levity ...”

“... this and much else besides comes to a rather abrupt end on the morning of Tuesday, 16 March 1976. Harold Wilson, four times prime minister, an ambitious man who loved politics and was in the pink of health, able not only to endure but to enjoy the physical and mental strain of the highest office in the land, announced his resignation that morning. Not only ...”

“... loved me too. In principle he was not in favour of strong family bonds. Possibly he saw brotherly love as an opening for exploitation … he wished to be a man entirely of today.’ It was important for Maury to be in the money and he made a fortune more than once. He played the anti-intellectual (while secretly reading books), and when his brother won the ...”

“... dénouement. On her travels, Porky, who is now quite affectless, meets a young Muslim who falls in love with her. They move into a flat in Earl’s Court, and, through indifference or self-destructiveness, she serves him a meal containing pork. Without the very careful setting – that wasteland between the A4 and the A30 – the story would lose much of its ...”

“... she said at once. It is rather sad that these letters, read in bulk, might serve to confirm Harold Nicolson’s feline judgment on Nancy Mitford: ‘She is essentially not an intellectual and there is a sort of Roedean hoydenishness about her which I dislike.’ I did not dislike her by the end of the book, but it comes as a surprise to be writing a ...”

“... of Lord Hastings married into the Wodehouses, who were once Norfolk squires. Wodehouse’s love affair with the Church of England has been something of an Usborne obsession. The game was played to strict rules. It was permissible to be funny about Church and churchmen, but not to mock the faith. Clergy could be treed by vicious dogs, bullied by their ...”

“... as Nicholas Mosley puts it, ‘to represent the war generation – or himself.’ Mosley fell in love with Cimmie at the end of the following year, when they were both in Plymouth helping Nancy Astor in her campaign to become the first woman MP. There is no reason beyond the obvious ones – she was good-looking, Curzon’s daughter and had an unusual ...”

“... sophisticated, elegant magazine?’ This was Ben Hecht’s way of phrasing the Big Question about Harold Ross, the question that was asked repeatedly throughout Ross’s twenty-five years in charge of the New Yorker, and is still sometimes asked today: how did he do it? Or rather (Ross loathed italics), how was that done by him? – ‘that’ being the last ...”

“... his maturity as a poet. The poetry enlarged its scope with the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold – which are about the intellectual and his political role, though to read Frederic Raphael you wouldn’t know it. Having shown Byron becoming a star, he doesn’t know what to do with him as a mere writer. The second half of the book, which takes Byron ...”

“... Who is hotter than Mary McCarthy? Smarter than Susan Sontag? Funnier than Harold Bloom? Well, if you take her word for it, it’s Camille Paglia, come to set the world straight on the burning issues of our time: tenured radicals, date rape, the aesthetic evolution of Madonna. The self-styled genius and warrior woman seized public attention with her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a sweeping, Strindbergian analysis of culture as the war of the sexes ...”

“... John Murray lasted a little over ten years. It began in March 1812 with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which made Byron’s name. (‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ he famously wrote, or is said to have written.) It ended twice: first, in the winter of 1822, when, after a number of disagreements and misunderstandings, Byron ...”

“... bi plus me = three. Indeed, the three should ideally be four; Garber remarks that the marriage of Harold and Vita Nicolson ‘was a “bisexual marriage” in an unusually complete way, since both of them had same-sex partners’. But why is the Nicolson marriage ‘unusually complete’? Does it not present the only format for a marriage of equals? Isn’t ...”

“... Ever since 1958, when his play The Birthday Party opened in London, Harold Pinter has been admired by the judicious for the witty realism of his dialogue and the engrossing mystery of his omissions – particularly his omission of motive, his blank refusal to explain why: why his characters are behaving so weirdly, why they are saying such terrible things ...”