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“... for analysis and description, with evident enjoyment of the human spectacle. The stories by Sir Harold Acton are pervaded by something nearer resignation: oddity is exposed, and not really put down, but celebrated only in back-handed ways. They concern expatriates in Florence, and take a good old-fashioned chunk of a lifetime (up to thirty years or ...”

“... of helpers and informants. Flagging only in the last stretch of the alphabet, they range from Sir Harold Acton to Douglas Woodruff, and like his subject the author has evidently ‘made it his business to know people whom he thought worth knowing’. He dissociates himself from what he calls ‘the vacuum-cleaner school’ of biographers, but remains ...”

“... her, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot praised her work, Aleister Crowley exploited it. In the Twenties Harold Acton came across her in Paris, not exactly among ‘the bevies of truculent women’ who surrounded Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford but somewhere near. On the fringe of the Montparnasse bars were a few talented storytellers running to seed, like poor ...”

“... by Charlotte Mosley; as well as Selina Hastings’s clear-sighted, of-the-milieu biography. Harold Acton’s knowing, gossipy, intimate memoir, long out of print and now reissued, is a welcome readdition to the canon: it makes you weep with laughter on most pages. Or scream, perhaps. That Nancy and her sisters never laughed at jokes, but rather ...”

“... along the way with famous people. If they are sweet to him, he writes them up handsomely: Sir Harold Acton gets a good press, the Countess Anne Maria Cicogna was nice to Davies in Venice, Graeme Souness and Trevor Francis took time out from the football pitch to chat with him, Nabokov and Davies wandered around Montreux. These men are rewarded with ...”

“... His point of view is more that of a journalist than of a scholar or scientist.’ Absorbed, with Harold Acton and Brian Howard, in the creation of a daring aesthetic manifesto to be called ‘The Eton Candle’, Connolly would have been greatly disturbed by this deflating prophecy, which was soon to be echoed by a boy called Jessel, one of his friends ...”

“... of A Clockwork Orange. The book is crammed with intriguing chunks of information. We learn that Harold Monro, who established the Poetry Bookshop shortly before the First World War, was a twice-married homosexual of Scottish ancestry whose family owned a private lunatic asylum. Of the writers who made their literary debuts in the interwar era, well over a ...”

“... is likely to enjoy such books as Martin Green’s Children of the Sun, in which people like Harold Acton and Brian Howard and Cyril Connolly, and all who profess to believe that heterosexual affairs are ‘the mark of state-subsidised undergraduates’, are dug reeking from their lairs, scraped and dumped. Like Orwell, he has a particular loathing ...”

“... such white skins’; ‘Gentlemen never wear brown in London.’ (‘It is necessary to admit,’ Harold Nicolson wrote in his own fawning Curzon biography, ‘that it required several months of close association with Lord Curzon before even the most well-intentioned observer could wholly rid himself of a sense of unreality.’) Nothing is funnier than a noun ...”

“... for traces of my ancestor’s ghost and I headed over the river to the British Institute’s Harold Acton Library. The institute was founded in 1917, so had no contemporary records of my great-great-grandfather’s death. What it did have were two copies of the diary that Arnold Bennett kept while in Florence in 1910, which is full of details of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... you must be Mr J.M. Barrie,’ to which Sir James, ‘slyly’, says: ‘You are not far wrong.’ Harold Acton, with his ‘Big Ben’ voice, presides at the last dinner of Oxford’s banned Hypocrites’ Club, which ends in much goat-like leaping about, the sort of conduct which would not have been tolerated in commercial travellers. Evelyn Waugh, in ...”

“... as such as ‘could only have been contrived by a poet who had never experienced pregnancy’. To Harold Acton she was ‘the essential hysterical intellectual spinster’ and however unpleasant his tone it is impossible to disagree with his conclusion that ‘dear Edith wasn’t exactly what you might call cuddly.’ As so often it is Sitwell herself ...”

“... slender evidence. As an undergraduate, he was the contemporary of Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton and other gilded youths who expected the world to pay attention to them. As the editor of Oxford Outlook, he asked his father to try to persuade their Berkhamsted neighbour, the eminent historian G.M. Trevelyan, to contribute, while sending his ...”

“... Sackville-West. They were together for a decade. ‘Princess Winnie taught Violet discretion,’ Harold Acton wrote. ‘It was rumoured with a whip.’But unlike Singer or Smyth, who was laughed at for wearing an evening dress hitched up with safety pins and using toilet roll to blow her nose, Souhami’s women are rarely figures of fun. They have ...”