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“... more complicated than anything within my own experience, they were good reading after all that James Bond nonsense … Actually, I have all his books and have enjoyed them all, except The Honourable Schoolboy; it was so long and so far-fetched that it faded long before the end.’ The second half, though, is something else altogether. In it Sisman appears ...”

“... There had been a number of experiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s – among them Harold Nicolson’s delightful vignettes Some People, Lytton Strachey’s psychological melodrama Elizabeth and Essex and A.J.A. Symons’s detective mystery. The Quest for Corvo – all designed to find more imaginative and adventurous ways of writing ...”

“... mood in this early uncertain period of the war. He was being turned into a ‘poster-poet’, Harold Monro, the editor of Poetry Review, wrote, but ‘“He did his duty? Will you do yours?” is hardly the moral to be drawn.’ Maybe not, but it was handy for the government all the same. Soon enough, the myth of the heroic soldier-poet was joined by that ...”

“... company was sought by a younger generation of gifted men (Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Harold and Willie Acton, Ronald Firbank, Raymond Mortimer) who saw her as an intriguing survivor from the faded Yellow Book past. Encouraged by these, she published a slim volume containing her reminiscences of Wilde and his letters to her, for the third time ...”

“... repugnant to Eliot, came to fascinate the postmodernist generation, and led to important essays by Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller. Wolfgang Iser’s study of Pater was crucial to the genesis of reception theory at the University of Konstanz in the 1960s.Pater reportedly told his students that ‘the great thing is to read authors whole; read Plato ...”

“... the ballot box’ to determine whether Britain should join. After winning the election, Harold Wilson renegotiated Heath’s terms of entry, then put the deal before the electorate in a referendum in 1975. His appeal to popular sovereignty immediately generated a distinctive kind of non-parliamentary politics. While the prime minister campaigned for ...”

“... to bodge and skimp: you have to believe that this, after all, will do. If you don’t, you’re Harold Brodkey. If you still believe that writers work hard, go and live with one for a week, and the next time they’re whining about their sad and difficult lives pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge while having another coffee break and trying to ...”

“... And if I do so, it is because my version of events has a relevance to the immediate past when James Callaghan agreed to Chevaline without telling most of the Cabinet, let alone the Labour Party, and when Margaret Thatcher with the solitary aid of Cecil Parkinson conducted the major decisions of the Falklands War. It so happens that Arthur Tedder was a ...”

“... Revisited all played their part. But no step was more important than the appointment in 1936 of James Lees-Milne as secretary of the National Trust’s Country Houses Committee. The story of how this Baroque-loving, Etonian aesthete travelled the length and breadth of the country, persuading indigent owners to hand over their properties to the Trust in ...”

“... Entering the House of Commons at the age of 21, which was by law the minimum age, although Charles James Fox had earlier been ‘elected’ when 19, Pitt immediately made a profound impression with his maiden speech. Instead of being the usual over-rehearsed address bearing little relation to what had been said by previous speakers, it was delivered impromptu ...”

“... natural casting as a failure. He is a classic writer, in the old Esquire tradition, a lesser James Salter, and a dedicated ladies’ man. Specktor’s chapter on him turns into a synopsis for a screwball movie with its account of the filming of what became 92 in the Shade (1975).McGuane and his first wife, Becky, lived in glamorously wild places ...”

“... offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake of his co-author, who ...”

“... also the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone through the motions of a renegotiation of Britain’s place in the European Economic Community and, with that token effort behind him, shepherded the forces of pragmatism to a resounding victory for remaining in the Common Market. The ...”

“... into defensive ‘bastions’ in home waters under the ice. In The Silent Deep, Peter Hennessy and James Jinks recount the history of the Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945. Naval history as such is a new departure for Hennessy, but in his extensive writings on politics and society, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and intelligence and state secrets, he ...”

“... Maudling, Heath’s rival for the Conservative leadership in 1965? Would you buy the life of James Callaghan now, if he hadn’t cashed in long ago? Did you then, for that matter? The stately progress of the Heath oeuvre reveals a certain chutzpah in an author evidently quite confident that people will still care about his life-chronicle. But that ...”