“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have since formed the central argument of the spirited study by the young English historian Harold James, A German Identity. In a lively sketch, James suggests that historically, German conceptions of their identity as a nation moved through a sequence from cultural to political to economic definitions in the late 18th and 19th centuries ...”

“... the University of Salford (one of the former Colleges of Advanced Technology so smiled on in the Harold Wilson/C.P. Snow years) found its budget cut by over 40 per cent. The second key date was 1986, which saw the first Research Assessment Exercise, the brainchild of “Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, then chairman of the UGC. An attempt to measure the quality of ...”

“... no one will.’ The joke is perhaps that the lecture is unaware of Eliot’s epistolary life (‘Love letters are monotonous; the recipient of the letter should be a mature friend’) – and that it conceals how hard he is thinking about the subject.Put differently: here are 1131 letters (eight thousand pages or scans, including envelopes and ...”

“... time known for its resistance to decolonisation – hosted the MP and Monday Club vice chairman Harold Soref. A group of students forced their way into the meeting while Soref fled down a back staircase. Oxford’s Conservative, Labour and Liberal clubs all condemned the protesters’ action. In 1985, the Oxford Union cancelled an event with members of ...”