“... of the book, for Mary McCarthy’s first husband was the actor, scriptwriter and embryo playwright Harold Cooper Johnsrud, with whose activities she was closely concerned before she left Vassar at the time of her marriage. They parted after a few years and Johnsrud died in 1939 of burns received when trying to rescue one of his manuscripts from a fire in his ...”

“... later, when he has lost faith in magic, he invents a mumbo-jumbo with which to deceive his sister. Harold, the father, is invariably too busy reading to speak: later, when he remarries and brings the red-headed Myra into his house, he speaks in port-manteau phrases culled from BBC programmes. The isolated Bawne says as little as possible, even when he goes ...”

“... and murderer of children, a figure of such demonic presence that he can only be compared, as Harold Bloom said, to the great Shakespearean villains. ‘It makes no difference what men think of war,’ the Judge declares. ‘War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade ...”

“... to Bloomsbury tastes emerged at Sissinghurst in Kent, where Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, found the remains of a great courtyard house that had once played host to Elizabeth I. It was already in ruins when Horace Walpole saw it in 1752 and all that now survived was one low range of buildings and a single great tower. Restoring it was ...”

“... the roller-coaster nature of its affections. During the sharp conflicts of twenty-five years ago, Harold Wilson was not a newspaper hero in his dealings with Hugh Gaitskell. But after Gaitskell’s death, a single speech on the white heat of the technological revolution transformed his reputation. As Prime Minister, from 1964, he enjoyed complete domination ...”

“... cooked up his gris-gris under the musical supervision of another New Orleans musician, Harold Battiste, during time carved out of Sonny & Cher’s recording schedule at the Gold Star studio in Los Angeles in the summer of 1967. The results were released the following year as a notably short long-player, Gris-Gris, credited to Dr John, the Night ...”

“... does, somewhere between literary respectability and bestsellerdom: John O’Hara, Nelson Algren, James Jones, John Hersey. Parini declares in a fighting Afterword that answers to the Steinbeck question ‘spring to mind’. Clearly the answer which springs highest and most persistently is intellectual snobbery. Steinbeck’s low status is ascribed to the ...”

“... literary works are made up of recycled bits and pieces of other works, so that, in the words of Harold Bloom, ‘the meaning of a poem is another poem.’ This doctrine of intertextuality is not to be confused with good old-fashioned literary influence. Such influences are mostly conscious and generally sporadic, whereas for Postmodernism it is impossible ...”

“... agree that this constant viciousness had its effect on Douglas’s entire demeanour. According to Harold Nicolson, ‘His nose has assumed a curious beak-like shape, his mouth has twisted into shapes of nervous irritability.’ Others noted his extraordinary high-pitched voice and exaggerated fidgeting. ‘He had curious movements,’ wrote Anthony ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was all. This phase of Miller’s career was astonishingly productive. For him as for Henry James, Europe made literature discutable. Always fluent, Miller now erupted with articles, books, essays and reviews – almost always prefaced with genuflection to the European sages who had inspired him. Miller has retained two features in his work that are ...”

“... about the corrupting effect of horror films had been growing in the interwar period. In 1931 James Whale’s Frankenstein was banned by London County Council and Manchester City Council, prompting the British Board of Film Censors to introduce a new class of certification: H for ‘horrific’. Set up twenty years earlier, the BBFC was the fledgling film ...”

“... of straw with two orange feathers like Mercury’s wings’, Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson. It ‘pleased Virginia because there could be absolutely no doubt as to which was the front and which the back’. It pleased her less a few days later. Virginia and Vita had bumped into Vanessa Bell in the street (she was wearing ‘her quiet ...”

“... also alleged that Corbyn had been ‘a paid informant’ and flattered Sarkocy as ‘a communist James Bond’. Inevitably, the Tories were by now enthusiastically clambering onto the bandwagon. First out of the traps was the brash young defence secretary, Gavin Williamson. The Sun’s report, he said, shows why Corbyn cannot be trusted: ‘Time and time ...”