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“... piles of books which they have ordered online. Seminars are held for the elite academics among the guest scholars and they continue their discussions beside the pool, to the bemusement of the guests of the conservation scientists or the Provenance Index, who may be experts on shellfish dyes or Dutch inventories, but are unlikely to be well versed in Benjamin ...”

“... of as an upper-class distrust of niceness’. And, of course, he’s interested in what Nick Guest, the James-fixated central character in The Line of Beauty (2004), thinks of as ‘the homosexual subject’. In The Stranger’s Child he weaves a number of stories around the idea of Brooke and his posthumous fortunes, detailing the lives caught up in the ...”

“... autobiography that at a dinner at the American Embassy at which John Bright was the chief British guest, he thumped the table and announced: ‘the English are a nation of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This statement shocked Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell, the Minister, and the other Americans present. They felt it inappropriate ...”

“... the Metaphysical poets with Douglas Bush, 20th-century poetry with F.O. Matthiessen, and attended Harry Levin’s lecture course on Proust, Joyce and Mann. He wrote a number of poems that would later be included in his Yale Younger Poets collection, Some Trees. He wrote a send-up of Robert Lowell, whose poetry he couldn’t stand: ‘Mudgulping trawler, Truro ...”

“... and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after the war Frank became for many of us an ...”

“... for Eric Hobsbawm’s dry eloquence at the Cambridge University Socialist Club (or CUSC) and Harry Pollitt’s stirring oratory at Popular Front rallies in Hyde Park and at the Albert Hall. In addition, we studied the Basic Texts and met in our college cells to read each other jejune papers culled from the Masters. On setting out on our hitchhiking ...”

“... from his farm for an illicit weekend. Here is Jack Soames drilling holes ‘in the roof above the guest bedrooms and peering down at them’. (Which just goes to show how far gossip can be embellished, especially in the heat: given the way houses were built in colonial Africa, surely even the most mutually entranced of couples would have heard their host ...”

“... unnerved people. After receiving an honorary degree from Harvard, his alma mater, he retired to a guest suite to change. The president of the university watched with fascination as TR tore off his coat and vest and slammed a large pistol on the dresser. Asked if it was his habit to carry firearms, TR replied: ‘Yes, when I am going into public places.’ He ...”

“... Alleged to be Jewish, etc, etc, I was, Atlas reports, consigned by Bellow to the same category as Harry Levin: ‘a Harvard kike’. Bellow himself had reason to know that none of these characterisations was accurate; Atlas should have checked them out. I first met Bellow in 1960 at Bard College, where I was visiting my friends and his, Jack Ludwig and his ...”

“... it? So many functions to go to, so much dysfunction to come back to. When Princess Margaret made a guest appearance at the Borsetshire fashion show in an episode of The Archers, the producer said after the run-through: ‘That’s very good, ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?’‘Well, I wouldn’t ...”

“... that film comedy was a commercial goldmine, there would have been no Keaton, or Harold Lloyd, or Harry Langdon. He laid the path along which they swept to success. I wish Robinson had found the space to explain a little about the sad fate of so many of the films. His accounts are based upon seeing the early films in their best surviving form. Most people are ...”

“... One of the strong points of Beckett’s book is its wealth of portraits of individuals, among them Harry Pollitt and Johnny Campbell; Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, two of the very few who found a way into Parliament; Palme Dutt the Swedish-Indian, more theologian than political thinker; and Bert Ramelson, a Ukrainian-Canadian, who became a very able and ...”

“... district lies. The pleasure seeker is out and about, free from the obligations of either host or guest, yet still assured of a congenial milieu, whether looking at paintings, browsing in perfumeries or scanning a menu. Among the features of the West End which were novel and luxurious for the later Georgians were pavements, plate glass shop windows and ...”

“... from these discussions. Worse still was the habit which had grown up under the former editor, Harry Evans, of delegating power and responsibility within the newspaper. The plainest example of that was the Insight investigative team, which worked largely under its own editorial control. A common expression in journalism in the Seventies was ...”

“... he settled permanently in 1966, leaving a soon-to-be ex-wife and three children behind in London. Harry Ransom, then president and later chancellor of the university, was determined to make it a cultural centre, a not incurious notion. He proposed ‘that there be established somewhere in Texas – let’s say in the capital city – a centre of our cultural ...”