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“... alter egos, Susie and Antonia, and the letters reveal the existence of a protracted infatuation or love affair with a young man called Charles Thurstan Edward-Collins (the possessor of the ‘grey feminine eyes’). Louis returned to Marlborough to visit after he left for Oxford. (‘I told Charles I wasn’t coming to M.C. any more but I expect I shall. The ...”

“... transformed his life. His journals of the time are the record of a passionate cross-Channel love affair with the Parisian avant garde (and varyingly intellectual fringe members of both sexes on both sides of the Channel). He spent his most creative decade commuting between bohemian Surrealist Paris, dominated by its belligerent pontiff, André ...”

“... getting the boy to change his name, once he becomes a poet, to Hart (her maiden name) Crane, from Harold Hart Crane, giving him a stage-name, so to speak, that is the starkest combination of his parents. And father as capitalist – creator of ‘the largest maple syrup business of its kind in the world’, inventor of the Lifesaver, and a successful and then ...”

“... in the Army have become so devoted to their President. Walt Whitman, with his idea of ‘adhesive love’, might have offered an explanation: that bearded nurse makes a brief appearance in the novel, and we half-expect him to eulogise the President, but that would be too embarrassing. Lincoln’s grandeur and awesomeness must, for Vidal, be presented more ...”

“... silent.’ ‘The fear of people’ had been ‘instilled’ in her, as had a desperate need for love. She was impulsively generous, sympathetic to any suffering in people or animals, but desperately over-sensitive to criticism or rebuff. She changed her mind and her feelings about people violently and often and at such moments she was not silent, often in ...”

“... postwar childhood, and the 1960s bring out the scold in him. Cabinet ministers were disgraced for love, thugs robbed a mail-train and were hailed as heroes, unmasked traitors were admired for their complex personalities, the harlot’s cry from mews to mews had the exultant confidence of Callas singing ‘Casta diva’ and the Beatles mouthed and mimed to ...”

“... Frank Ocean, who astonished the luridly heterosexual R’n’B scene last year by recording love songs addressed to his boyfriend. But what if she’d just prefer to be one of the characters in Made in Chelsea? Heti, who turned 36 on Christmas Day, has said that one of the starting points of the novel (others were Warhol and Werner Herzog and ...”

“... he had sent his son Euan to the Oratory, despite the inevitable political flak, said: ‘Look at Harold Wilson’s children.’ The journalist demurred: one of Wilson’s sons had become a headmaster, the other a university professor. Blair replied that he certainly hoped his children would do better than that. Since we hardly try to block that kind of ...”

“... has coloured my entire life and works,’ Fitzgerald declared in a letter to his literary agent, Harold Ober. But it wasn’t just money: Brown’s biography shows the ways in which he consistently favoured the aristocratic, the premodern and romantic. As a child, he loved to pretend he was the foundling son of a medieval monarch, denying his parentage (like ...”

“... the achievements of Socrates, Jesus Christ or St Francis on a world scale. It is true that perfect love casteth out fear: it happens again and again at the individual level. Most people, even if they have never felt anything like that themselves, have probably glimpsed somebody else feeling something like that. (Or is this too optimistic?) After World War Two ...”

“... rule: She has a special stature of her own – One can only believe in Russia. This intertwined love and hate of the motherland, this obsessive fascination with the concept and essence of Russianness, coupled with an unrelenting inquiry into the future and destiny of the country – ‘Whither do you gallop, proud horse, and where do you put your ...”

“... to one of the older boys. One day, as he was jumping from one parapet to another like a miniature Harold Lloyd, he ‘missed the parapet and started hurtling through the air. But, as I had on so many other occasions, I saved myself from a fall – this time by catching hold of a brick projection.’   When Mamaji came to hear of the incident, she forbade ...”

“... not to the baronage: to the exam-passing classes, rather than to the order-giving ones. To use Harold Macmillan’s classification, he was a ‘gownsman’, not a ‘swordsman’. Unfortunately, he did not pass his exams well enough to be a really confident gownsman. He was an Oppidan at Eton, not a Colleger; a closed exhibitioner at King’s, not a ...”

“... Sir Gerald Nabarro once said that without his moustache he might be mistaken for a nobody like Harold Wilson; behind his formidable moustache and haughty stare Kitchener was as scheming and ambitious a self-publicist as ever wore uniform. That poster was his apogee: it might as accurately have been captioned ‘Your Country Needs ME.’ From the moment ...”

“... gave way to a sense of the advantages. For a start the voters might have fallen a little out of love with the idea of electoral reform. Proportional representation is a quick fix to whatever is wrong with the British democratic process. And the unseemly negotiations to fix up this coalition, where party manifestos become pick-and-mix bargaining ...”