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“... reaction to the book has centred too narrowly on its slighting references to ex-colleagues. Robert Harris’s furious depiction of it (in the Independent on Sunday) as spluttering with ‘rage, malice, contempt and hatred’ is probably the extreme case. The memoirs of other premiers, Harris notes, have shown saintly ...”

“... eat only in non-chains, never hurry, spend a day in San Antonio meeting a man I’ll call Don Harris, for whom Michael might design a house, write songs to perform at an open mike in Nashville. Charlie would ride in the bed of the truck, and we would have the cab. I tied his long leash to the truck’s roll bar, so he’d know not to jump out. Michael ...”

“... as a labourer on the great tunnel under Lake Ontario. This construction is the dream of Rowland Harris, a man as gigantically selfish and driven as was Small, who in his perfectionism imports herringbone tiles from Siena for his tunnel’s toilets. Irrationally, these small ornaments radicalise Patrick and although the narrative becomes misty at this ...”

“... Nordic – I hope he took some light reading as well.) On the other side, he takes on Marvin Harris, one of the leading figures in cultural ecology. Bloch takes Harris to task for thinking that the Indians refuse to kill cows, ‘not because of the theological reasons they delude themselves with, but because this is ...”

“... up to Cambridge in 1938, he intended to become a medical missionary, and met his first wife, Ruth Harris, at Congsoc (the University Congregational Society). Soon she was ‘washing his test tubes’ and they were tacitly engaged, though they wouldn’t have sex until 1943, when they got married.Early in the war, as he began his practical medical training and ...”

“... its texture, its clichés. Over the years Amis has done a lot of virtuous wincing over clichés. John Fowles is a prominent target: ‘He managed a wan smile’; ‘God, you’re so naive.’ No expensive talk about Descartes, Marivaux, Lemprière and Aristophanes can procure a pardon for that sort of thing. Other reviewers may commend Thomas ...”

“... or merely a proofreader’s oversight? The second is Anthony Blunt’s account of Tomas Harris, whom he describes as ‘artist, art dealer and intelligence officer’. What wistful, envious or remorseful sense of irony prompted Blunt to remark that Harris perpetrated ‘the most successful doublecross operation of ...”

“... his spouse to a dazed friend with ‘That’s My First Wife Up There, and This Is the Present Mrs Harris.’ The first Mrs Harris seems to be crouched on all fours on the top of a very high (glazed) bookcase, just behind the second Mrs Harris. This image has found an appreciative audience ...”

“... police of these groups?The answer rested on the definition of ‘subversive’. In 1975 Lord Harris, a Labour Home Office minister, provided a definition to Parliament that had been used internally by the Security Service since 1972: ‘Subversive activities are generally regarded as those which threaten the safety or well-being of the state, and which ...”

“... of my (and his) generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life: Frank Machin (Richard Harris), mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits. But Arthur doesn’t take it lying down: no longer a sportsman but ...”

“... so: it is the first great piece of luck on which his career has flourished. The second, as Robert Harris points out, was the date of his birth: Kinnock is just old enough to have imbibed at first hand from his parents, uncles and grandparents vivid memories of the hardship and degradation of Tredegar between the wars, but just young enough to have benefited ...”

“... for thirteen pence a day. Yet there is an unmistakable authenticity about Housman’s work. John Bayley starts his explorations by emphasising Housman’s pessimism, and this is not a mere set of ideas: it had grown from a personal disappointment deep into the roots of his mind. The Martyrdom of Man (1872) – Winwood Reade’s reach-me-down history of ...”

“... could not, however, be credited to Maitland’s Cambridge colleague and fellow devotee of Gierke, John Neville Figgis. As an anti-Erastian Anglican churchman, Figgis was deeply exercised by the dispute within the Edwardian Scottish Free Church (a dispute only ultimately settled by Parliamentary legislation). And as a priest and theologian in the ...”

“... sensation I had,’ Biden wrote, ‘was best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”’Biden became the tragic young man of the Senate, uncertain whether he should resign to look after his surviving children. But in his account the Senate’s old guard welcomed him and gave ...”

“... to marry her, including Leland Hayward, the agent and producer, and she had been nearly raped by John Barrymore, according to whom she had backed away against the wall of his dressing-room stammering: ‘No, no, my father doesn’t want me to have babies.’ Her mother, after all, apart from her social grandeur, was a serious and distinguished pioneer in the ...”