“... for his intelligence work. He got into the magazine business after being approached at Le Dôme by Harold ‘Doc’ Humes, who recognised him from a previous meeting in Pamplona in 1949, where they were both observing the running of the bulls. For $600 Humes had purchased the Paris News Post, something like a crude Time Out, and recruited Matthiessen as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... declared in his diary that he feared Hubert, a ‘nectar-like’ guardsman with whom he was in love, would be ‘killed in the rioting’, but signed on as special constable nevertheless: ‘[I] begin dangerous duties tonight at six with terror in my heart. Only for England would I do this. I have a baton and a whistle.’ Torrance suggests that in ‘one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... these well-meaning young people without seeming ungrateful. ‘Have you ever seen anyone making love?’ said Laura. ‘To tell you the truth,’ said Mrs Donaldson pretending to cast her mind back, ‘I don’t think I have.’ ‘Oh good,’ said Laura. ‘We were bothered it might not be much of a novelty.’ ‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Donaldson, ‘it ...”

“... In 1929 he was floating a municipal bond in Milan, at the behest of John McCloy, when he fell in love with the newly-wed wife of one of his Italian employees. There was no divorce under Mussolini, and a child was born two years later. Attempts to get the marriage annulled were resisted by the husband and father, and refused by the Vatican. By 1934 Monnet’s ...”