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“... most famous bon mot was that, in sacking a third of his cabinet on the Night of the Long Knives, Harold Macmillan demonstrated the truth that ‘greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.’ But the transformation of the programme and fortunes of his party remain his principal ...”

“... Warren Beatty, such pals that no one trusted anyone. Specktor admits that he is ‘unabashedly in love’ with Eastman (as if ‘unabashedly’ was a decent trope of sincerity), and I think that’s because in life and in Hollywood, possibility is the most touching thing – and the thing that can have you waiting by the phone for months. Specktor doesn’t ...”

“... morbidity or schmaltz. The slow but sure revival of interest in Tennessee Williams – this summer Harold Pinter directing Sweet Bird of Youth, and brilliantly – suggests a general awareness that there may currently be a hole where our theatre’s heart should be. That declaration of intent comes, not in one of Williams’s purple prefaces, but as a stage ...”

“... fame and fortune as a biographer: Pimlott’s achievement was to make the lives of Hugh Dalton and Harold Wilson – two Labour politicians with flawed personalities and flyblown reputations – into the stuff of compelling biography. Orwell once claimed that everything he wrote had a socialist purpose. It could almost be said of Pimlott that everything he ...”

“... sloven among slovens, chronic debtor and philanthropist, vagrant and on-the-spot accoucheur, free love enthusiast and original of Dickens’s Harold Skimpole. The other day he surprised me at second-hand. There he was, dark and mistrustful, eyeing me through a bookshop window. Benjamin Haydon’s touching and slightly ...”

“... you suffer from anxiety of influence with regard to early versions of yourself, as if, to twist Harold Bloom, your early self now played an insurmountably glorious Milton to your later romantic phases? Did Shakespeare say to himself: ‘No way I can beat Hamlet, so why write again?’ Jon Elster wrote two gems in the 1970s and 1980s, Ulysses and the Sirens ...”

“... formative years in rural Surrey. Although trained in the architectural office of Ernest George and Harold Peto, the older of whom was an able vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen builders. Eventually, he all but ...”

“... English literature, who takes for granted that he will go home to Corinth at the height of his love affair rather than damage his prospects of gaining tenure there. While his glamorous love life is running into these obstacles, Vinnie’s carefully-protected routines break down. Her American acquaintance of the plane, a ...”

“... them ‘desiccated calculating machines’. Attlee regarded theory as stuff and nonsense and Harold Wilson doused his food with HP Sauce to project a plain-man image. It was the people’s dominatrix who caused a turnaround. Pragmatic to the core, she took up philosophers she agreed with and allowed her instincts to be dignified as an ideology. Since ...”

“... Rosalind arrived. Archie seemed unlike his usual self: pressed, he admitted that he had fallen in love with his golf partner, Miss Nancy Neele. An impossible three months followed. Archie blew hot and cold, moving from his London club to Styles, and then back to the club. Agatha’s only friend was her wire-haired terrier, Peter. In December she ...”

“... got a chance in a place like this,’ says a sixty-year-old woman called Rose at the opening of Harold Pinter’s first play, The Room. ‘It was the alcoholics’ paradise,’ Barry Humphries writes in his introduction to Darren Coffield’s entertaining book.You merely ran up a slate. Later, much later, came the reckoning, but you never knew how they ...”

“... plentiful diaristic accounts of the 1964-70 Labour Government. (Benn reveals, incidentally, that Harold Wilson promised that he would publish posthumously the real inside story of his government.) Many of the incidents and personalities that Benn describes are now of historical interest only, as indeed is the great battle he fought for the right to disclaim ...”

“... me some books from their recent series of diaries and letters.* Byron, I am afraid, meant little. Harold Nicolson’s diary gave me some pleasure, though I had read it often before. What has really delighted me is The Daughters of Karl Marx, their family correspondence between 1866 and 1898. Their letters are full of hardship but also of gaiety. From ...”

“... 17. Undeterred by this responsibility, the opening pages of At the Jazz Band Ball find him making love to his girlfriend, Sadie, another graduate of the Children’s Home, on the doorstep of her digs on Highbury Fields. It is 1944. Philip is living in London, dodging the flying bombs, occasionally visiting Emma (a motherly soul who makes no demands on ...”

“... visitors who refused to leave?’ In the context of so much pious theorising about ‘intransitive love’, the ‘mutual guardianship of solitude’ (Rilke’s definition of marital bliss) and the sacrosanctity of the artist’s vocation, such plain speaking comes as a refreshing surprise. All the same, Rilke’s treatment of his wife and child makes, by and ...”