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“... in Italy the following winter’. Their ‘union of souls’, as Jangfeldt (or his translator, Harry Watson) quaintly puts it, ‘took place in Venice in May 1893’. The relationship lasted until Victoria’s death in 1930, though it was severely strained during the First World War. Victoria, the daughter of Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden and a ...”

“... with an ex-guardsman, Tony Hyndman (called ‘Jimmy Younger’ in Spender’s autobiography, ‘Harry Watson’ by Worsley and ‘a secretary’ by Hugh Thomas in his history of the Spanish Civil War). The relationship went sour, Spender married, and Tony-Jimmy-Harry, fired by the doctrines he had picked up from his ...”

“... When​ Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930, some Soviet writers interpreted it as an act of protest: stifled by political censorship, he couldn’t go on. In the decades since, the suicide of the great poet of the Revolution has been seen as the Soviet Union’s point of no return. This is the view taken by the Swedish scholar Bengt Jangfeldt in this biography, the first significant non-Soviet Life of the poet: ‘The bullet that penetrated Vladimir Mayakovsky’s heart also shot to pieces the dream of communism and signalled the beginning of the communist nightmare of the 1930s ...”

“... and a character in T.C. Worseley’s autobiographical novel Fellow Travellers (Worseley calls him Harry Watson). But Strachan’s intention is always to give Redgrave the benefit of his own doubts: For part of that time the dutiful son, adoring husband and doting father was still involved in his affair with Tony. On Tony’s side there was no intention ...”

“... his hand. His throat feels tight.He jumps.My habit took hold in 2006, not long before the last Harry Potter and Twilight novels came out (in 2007 and 2008 respectively) and the year I got a laptop for Christmas. It was a relief no longer to have to make furtive use of the shared home computer. I’d been convinced my parents were going to find out what I ...”

“... that few people knew what he was famous for. In spite of her book’s title, reminiscent of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Ferry never suggests that Perutz was famous for discovering the secret of life. So what was his involvement in the discovery? What, for that matter, is the secret of life? Ferry keeps to the conventional meaning of the ...”

“... Montpellier (where he undertook a little research into coal-tar derivatives) – to surprise Dr Watson at his Paddington consulting rooms some years later, in the guise of an elderly bibliophile. By the time of Holmes’s resurrection in ‘The Empty House’ (1903), Arthur Conan Doyle heartily resented his most famous creation, but vast amounts of cash had ...”

“... as a Watsonian gentleman more distinguished for decency than for brains) but his sometime friend Harry Houdini. Remembered today as an escape artist who was one of the first Hollywood stuntmen, Houdini was equally well known during his lifetime for his campaign against spiritualism. Houdini’s repertoire of magic tricks placed him in an ideal position to ...”

“... come up to my cell door and just stare at me.’ Cut to the present day and you’ll find Emma Watson from Harry Potter playing our main girl in the movie, while back in the territory west of the Ventura Freeway, Alexis has just had a baby. The baby is called Harper, not after Harper Lee, but after the only daughter of ...”

“... student from Sparta [who] was a truly magnificent farter’. Beyond him he does not venture. Julia Watson stops with the old man of Blackheath who sat on his set of false teeth. Calamity and the gruesome, the crude and the slapstick, are given a suitable amount of space, and Harry Graham is perhaps overworked, though ...”

“... it for a pittance, ‘because everyone just saw the mills as places of drudgery,’ says Margaret Watson, the deputy editor of the Dewsbury Reporter, and the child and niece of mill-workers. ‘They were blackened, ugly – who wanted them?’ Bed manufacturers and businessmen, mostly. Stephen Battye, a local businessman, turned Joseph Newsome’s redbrick ...”

“... a failure of imagination. But there was, after all, a selfless, literary motive behind it all: Harry Evans of Random House told Brando ‘that if his company published a book about a movie star, the profits would enable him to publish books by talented unpublished authors that might not make money.’ Perhaps Harry Evans ...”

“... over the Channel – Claudel, Bernanos or Mauriac. Everyone loves a whisky priest or a Harry Lime: indeed, everyone loves just the kind of character whom Greene was good at creating – the seedy modernised Byronic hero, whose braised integrity and solitary virtue come out on top, or whose thousand crimes count for nothing against the sign of the ...”

“... plant police), Pullman (model town), Mary Baker Eddy (applied ontology), Taylor (time studies), Watson (behaviourism), Sanger (sex) etc, etc.’ Clearly Gaddis is concerned less with mechanisation per se than with the ‘more pervasive principle of organisation’ which continues to govern ‘automation and cybernetics, mathematics and ...”

“... later, Freud cut the Spender poems out of the book, ‘deeming them superfluous’.) Peter Watson, who funded Horizon, also began to enjoy Freud’s company. ‘He helped me very much, looked at my pictures and bought things and gave me money and books,’ Freud said. ‘He had pictures that I liked and learned from, very good things … He had a ...”