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“... 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 ...”

“... declared that ‘Shopland is my club,’ London was ripe for the shaking. The American merchant Harry Gordon Selfridge, who trained at Marshall Field in Chicago, had done careful research on the women’s clubs to find out what women wanted; he presented himself as a friend to women’s emancipation and ‘characterised the department store as a comfortable ...”

“... which she shall not be triedAt the last day? Will it then boot theeTo say a Philip, or a Gregory,A Harry, or a Martin taught thee this?(‘Philip’ is Philip II of Spain, ‘Gregory’ the pope, ‘Harry’ the Tudor king whose marital woes precipitated England’s break from Rome, and ‘Martin’ is Martin Luther – the ...”

“... takes a humbler path; he appears in obscure Spanish-language films (El Cantante de Napoles); as a guest on Ripley’s Believe It or Not Show; and as star attraction in such venues as the Kitty Davis Theatre Restaurant (a supper club in Miami Beach), and the Town Barn in Buffalo. Enrico Jr’s career as singer at least wakes from her long South American ...”

“... introduced to Anglophone readers, in translations by the Viennese refugee and Brandeis professor Harry Zohn:* Many share my views with me. But I don’t share them with them. To have talent, to be a talent: the two are always confused. Why should one artist grasp another? Does Mount Vesuvius appreciate Mount Etna? At most, a feminine relationship of ...”

“... mind I start to think of stage Scotsmen, impersonating themselves, and about why MacDiarmid hated Harry Lauder. Maybe Merle Collins’s poem about a popular soup, ‘Callaloo’, avoids such worries better, coming with balletic line-breaks out of an oral tradition, a home that nurtures but does not imprison: Mix up like callaloo Not no watery callaloo But a ...”

“... at a house party, when Churchill was so taken aback by a cutting remark Maugham made at another guest’s expense that the next day he said to him: ‘I want to make a compact with you. If you will promise never to be funny at my expense, I will promise never to be funny at yours.’ Virginia Woolf later described the character of Alroy Kear – Maugham’s ...”

“... new religious nationalists are the black-clad Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers, who have burned Harry Potter books on the embankment by the Kremlin to protest against J.K. Rowling’s Satanism, and Dmitry Enteo, a wan-faced youth with a goatee, who has made speeches on TV about his plan to throw bricks at the windows of Western department stores. Even the ...”

“... in most machines at highest speed. There is the black 45-horsepower Pope-Toledo Runabout in which Harry Houdini makes his first appearance, and the ‘new Voisin biplane’ in which he attracts the notice of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand (who travels by Daimler). There is the ‘electric hansom’ in which Evelyn Nesbit cruises the Lower East Side, a ...”

“... Is it unfair? A little. Is it calculated? Exactly so.’Fitzgerald’s working papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, reveal hints of the future she imagined for Chiara and Salvatore. Fitzgerald originally envisaged the novel in two parts: Part 1 would cover the events leading up to Chiara and Salvatore’s wedding in 1956; Part 2 would return to ...”

“... For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting. But it’s hard to know how much anyone likes any of her post-Horses work, or what ‘popular’ really signifies in her case. Smith isn’t Bruce Springsteen or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some ...”

“... Zuma may have ended up with a top job but he was utterly trounced in his contest with the ageing Harry Gwala in both the Southern Natal and the Natal Midlands regions. Gwala may be a self-confessed Stalinist but he, not Zuma, is clearly the ANC boss of Natal, the top ANC Zulu among Zulus. The whole Boesak melodrama was also about constituency. Boesak had ...”

“... struck him as ‘worth fighting for’. He ended up on the front in Aragon somewhat by chance. Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the British Communist Party, had flatly denied his request to join the International Brigades: his accent and background made him politically suspect. The International Labour Party had set up an office in Barcelona that ...”

“... with Padgett and Berrigan, and thereafter found herself making more than a hundred surprise guest appearances, often in the most unlikely of circumstances: ‘If Nancy Was a Building in New York City’ (that famous skyline with her spiky corona of hair replacing a block in midtown); ‘If Nancy Was a Sailor’s Basket’ (a diminutive Nancy waving from ...”

“... tree; and the adoration of the alms-bowl was everywhere. In a few minutes the Curator saw that his guest was no mere bead-telling mendicant, but a scholar of parts. And they went at it all over again, the lama taking snuff, wiping his spectacles, and talking in railway speed in a bewildering mixture of Urdu and Tibetan ... For the first time he heard of the ...”