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“... which includes the weave of the carpet under my bare feet, the moment I discovered my father’s love letters to my mother. I was about ten, mooching around his post-divorce home in Wiltshire, and in a furtive mood. He was gardening and I was peeved that he had not clocked how the hours drag for a bored child. Having nothing better to do, I lowered the drop ...”

“... century. In 1946, Murphy accompanied Sybille Bedford, with whom she had fallen passionately in love after leaving Arthur, on a strenuous and often rackety year-long peregrination through pre-tourist Mexico. (O, charmed and charming Sybille, when will someone write your biography?) In Bedford’s stylish mock-epic account of the trip, A Visit to Don Otavio ...”

“... to the Terror. The absolute freedom of the Enlightenment was the negation of trust, faith, love, life and history: all it meant was death by guillotine – ‘the coldest and meanest of all deaths’, Hegel said, ‘with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water’. Subsequent philosophical discussions of ...”

“... her, Bedford got a contract to write an entire book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams – the Harold Shipman of his time – at the Old Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In between, the book is structured ...”

“... He rather portentously advises Overt against marriage, whereupon the young writer sacrifices his love for the vivacious Marian Fancourt, goes off to Switzerland and writes a masterpiece. There’s a twist in the tail (and in the tale) as St George ends up marrying Ms Fancourt himself, but the whole thing strikes me as a pretty formulaic exercise and not at ...”

“... as the proletarian sex-class. ‘Socialist’ feminism, on the other hand, was more typical of Harold Wilson’s Britain, with its relatively powerful labour movement and bustling Marxist far left. Rowbotham had been a member of the Labour Party and the International Socialists, and worked with members of the International Marxist Group. Campbell was then ...”

“... it turned out that as an undergraduate he had been one of the group round Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton. But whereas most of that charmed circle went down without taking a degree, Pares turned his back on all that, took a First in Greats and was elected a fellow of All Souls. Thirty years later in December 1954, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford: I ...”

“... of it all that consumes him. On a trip to the Pyramids in the same year, his body man Reggie Love points out an image of a man’s face carved in the stone: ‘Not the profile typical of hieroglyphics but a straight-on head shot. A long, oval face. Prominent ears sticking out like handles. A cartoon of me, somehow forged in antiquity.’ They have a good ...”

“... He saw his colonial scholarship to study in England as an instance of divine election. Harold Laski’s lectures enraptured him along with the rest of the colonial students at the LSE. In his memoirs, written in the 1990s, Lee credited himself with a congenital distrust of student communists: ‘They used whatever means were at their disposal, like ...”

“... was awarded a CBE for his efforts, even though he was not yet thirty. There is a glimpse of him in Harold Nicolson’s diaries, at the Ritz with Kenyes. Somehow, his career at the Foreign Office rather petered out. Socially, he did not belong in the same drawer as the Etonians he had to deal with. They called him ‘Spots’, and he despised most of them. By ...”

“... fifty pages in, when she decides to audition for a talent contest at a nearby gay bar. She sang Harold Arlen’s ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’; when she had finished, ‘for a minute the whole room was silent. Then everyone burst into applause.’ She won the competition. Soon she was taken to the Bon Soir nightclub on Eighth Street for an audition. ‘It was the ...”

“... shock of American desertion at Suez and the re-election in 1959 of a Conservative government under Harold Macmillan that this stance changed. By 1960, the poor performance of the British economy compared with those of the six countries that had created the European Economic Community (EEC) was plain and, strongly encouraged by the Kennedy administration in ...”

“... Hoskins. A car has been detonated outside a Hawksmoor church. ‘We can’t have bombs going off, Harold. We can’t have corpses.’ But that, unfortunately, is the price in the catalogue. Spontaneous public celebration, dancing, hugging, shoulder-punching in the studios, then private grief, explosions on the Underground. Mutilation, carnage. A fluster of ...”

“... 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 ...”