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“... by heart, and surrounded by a posh, chattery, intellectual circle of Anglo-American expatriates: Harold Acton and his parents at La Pietra; Bernard and Mary Berenson at Villa I Tatti; the authors Janet Ross and Violet Paget (penname Vernon Lee); and streams of summer visitors including Edith Wharton and Vita Sackville-West. Though isolated from other ...”

“... Some younger people saw her as a sort of relic – people like the Sitwells and Ronald Firbank and Harold Acton – but all that rather bored her. She was very up to the minute, and would be full of the latest musical comedy or the latest thing that had been written. But she wrote a memoir of Wilde, which I published along with his letters to her in a ...”

“... to be sure, was self-inflicted: while a few of his fellow Etonians (Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton) were bursting precociously into print, Orwell chose to slave away in Parisian kitchens even when he was coughing up blood, sleep in dosshouses while cadging the odd ten shillings off his bemused parents, put in a spot of portering at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... since it found no other form than conversation. This was the generation of Bowra, Betjeman, Harold Acton, John Sutro, Connolly, Powell and Alan Pryce-Jones. Waugh was the supreme master and his novels are fit to stand by The Importance of Being Earnest. His vision is so penetrating and fantastical that infidels, heretics and schismatics, as well as ...”

“... it turned out that as an undergraduate he had been one of the group round Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton. But whereas most of that charmed circle went down without taking a degree, Pares turned his back on all that, took a First in Greats and was elected a fellow of All Souls. Thirty years later in December 1954, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy ...”

“... private individual, whose placid exterior concealed a very highly-strung disposition: like Harold Macmillan, he achieved unflappability at the cost of acute psychic strain. His main conception of politics was not one of ambitious policy-formation, but of conserving and adapting the invisible constitutional structures of national life. His political ...”

“... classic case is the work done by some of the contributors to this book among transport workers at Acton and at Aldenham. One shop steward put it bluntly: ‘Either you can fight and say no – forget the information or whatever it is, we’re going to fight for our jobs. Or you can go up the avenue you’re choosing, to seek to destroy the argument for ...”

“... attempt in 1976 to interest some officers at a Sandhurst dinner to ‘stand for Britain’ against Harold Wilson and the political class generally. His reception was so frosty that he went home early. Civil-military relations in Britain are no problem. Army-society relations are another matter, and one that has long been as important to the British as to any ...”

“... men and their modes, even to the extent of calling themselves George Eliot, or Currer, Ellis or Acton Bell. (Odd that the imitators should be inimitable.) No applause for authors laying claim to a tradition, and working within it: just a demand that gender should proclaim itself all over the prose. (Try applying this argument to writing by men, and you will ...”

“... the end of all his own poetry – the hero of every tale – the chief object of every landscape. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters, were universally considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron; and there is every reason to believe that he meant them to be so considered.’ It’s hardly surprising, then, that 19th-century readers took ...”

“... well as by a channel to the south. The mental planet that is peopled by Alfred and the Danes and Harold and the Conqueror has no place whatsoever for Hywell Dda, for Brian Boru, for Kenneth Mac Alpin or Macbeth.’ The culprits here were the Victorian historians, writing from and into their imperial time, as if all previous events had led up to the glorious ...”

“... in Lancashire, not Tyrone; Housman wrote A Shropshire Lad, not ‘The Shropshire Lad’; and the Harold to whom a Chinese goose is bequeathed in ‘Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament’ is Acton, not Action. Some words listed as indecipherable were decoded in Stallworthy’s biography, and in a few places ...”

“... to suspect certain spooks or ex-spooks of plotting – effectively or otherwise – to bring down Harold Wilson. It was certainly not – on its own – evidence of mental illness on Wilson’s part. MI5 was bound to be a likely suspect: highly secretive, socially exclusive, largely unaccountable, right-wing, reputedly clever, and with all kinds of tricks up ...”

“... nonsense. I was swearing at the radio: “I’ve got the list here! There’s nobody further than Acton! Nobody had been sent outside West London! And we gave people a lot of money. The council had said straightaway: “Give people as much money as you can.”’The prime minister asked Paget-Brown on the phone if the families were receiving money. ‘Five ...”