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“... apartments during the spring of 1887, while James described himself to Edmund Gosse as ‘making love to Italy’. Despite the myth that Woolson went to Europe in pursuit of James, the move appears to have had little to do with him, at least initially. ‘I am outward bound; – for the old world, before very long, I hope,’ she had written as early as the ...”

“... Edwardian watch-chain. But the Conservative benches soon learnt not to be deceived. When Harold Macmillan callously cleared out a third of his Cabinet in ‘the night of the long knives’ of July 1962, it was Thorpe who caused the Prime Minister to squirm by gravely rising to his feet and intoning in his deep, splendid, actor’s voice: ‘Greater ...”

“... it into fact. Richard Crossman touched upon the subject once. At the end of his first day as Harold Wilson’s Minister of Housing in 1964, he confided in his diary: ‘I continue to have this curious sense of fiction, the feeling that I am living in a Maurice Edelman novel.’ To be fair, Crossman’s unreality stemmed from the novelty of ministerial ...”

“... Count Filo della Torre, the London correspondent of the newspaper La Repubblica. It is a labour of love. The third book is another of Cosgrave’s works, Thatcher: The First Term. Perhaps at this stage I should be permitted to enter my own qualifications for putting pen to paper. It is as well that the reader should know my prejudices before I tackle the ...”

“... three-quarters drudgery, so it takes a special ingredient to enliven the diary of a politician. Harold Nicolson and Chips Channon wrote splendid diaries because they were not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal ...”

“... years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of Strachan’s in KwaZulu-Natal, where the author himself has lived much of his life. His name on the cover meant nothing to me – though if I had been more quick-witted I might have ...”

“... persuasive: we watch his best ideas and pet projects being blocked by his once encouraging boss, Harold Stone, and we see him being sweet-talked into the idea over lunch by a charismatic author, Victor Propp (Harold Brodkey-like, he has been writing a massive novel for the last twenty years, with the help of steadily ...”

“... pages. Trust is made up of four sections, the first presented as a complete novel (Bonds by Harold Vanner), the second as a draft memoir from the 1930s, both of them concerning a New York financier with a gift for reading and manipulating the market. The degree of overlap between Benjamin Rask in the novel and Andrew Bevel in the memoir is for the ...”

“... Professor Mehlman, who declares that he has been unjustly incarcerated merely because he is in love with a Venusian. Mehlman had constructed a giant telescope in the Andes to observe life on Venus. In the course of his studies, he had become smitten by the sight of a beautiful Venusian female, whom he kept watching. A Weird Appointment (1901) by Harry ...”

“... The first thing about Harold Macmillan was his bravery, and it was the last thing too. In the Great War he was wounded five times, at the Battle of Loos and at the Somme. At Delville Wood he was hit in the thigh and pelvis and rolled down into a large shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus ...”

“... at concealing ‘sexual feelings towards boys’ behind embroidered tales of early heterosexual love. Persuaded of this, she can treat the poet’s anecdotes of his youthful romantic disappointments as proof of his homosexual nature. He told stories of women who had let him down ‘to distract attention from his real sexual predilections’. At Harrow he ...”

“... family background, as Moorhead tells it, was one of genteel philistinism. Carrington’s father, Harold – a textiles magnate who became the principal shareholder in Imperial Chemicals Industries – was said to be the wealthiest man in Lancashire, but the family was uneasy about its status, and his wife, Maurie, complained that she was snubbed by the local ...”

“... Harold​ Bloom, who died at the age of 89 just before the publication of The American Canon, made his name in 1973 with The Anxiety of Influence. It was a great title, which soon became a catchphrase. The book itself used a crazy-paving of vocabulary drawn from the Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Lucretius and Freud to explain how Romantic and post-Romantic poets relate to their predecessors ...”

“... he thought there was something intrinsically disgusting and automatically degrading about physical love – and yet the opposite is the case. After all, he was a leading light at the Wet Dream Film Festival organised by Suck magazine in Amsterdam nine years ago, and I have heard him express the belief that human sperm contains psychedelic properties. To quote ...”

“... makes nothing of it, it rather blares at us, as writers’ tastes in music so often do (Joyce’s love of Puccini, for instance, or Auden’s dislike of Brahms). Tchaikovsky, that great melancholy confectioner, has hardly any temperamental affinity with Pushkin’s novel in verse. Eugene Onegin’s sparkling 14-line stanzas – little private carriages of ...”