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“... but it is possible to add Eleanor Roosevelt to the gallery – or at least Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson, whose names are murmured half-reverentially throughout Roth’s fiction. In Letting Go, Gabriel Wallach’s father organises a group of Manhattan doctors and lawyers in support of Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential campaign. And in My life as a ...”

“... whereas Foppington has to be blissfully innocent of any shadow of self-criticism. The novelist Paul Bailey has produced a biography of three ‘Queer Lives’; that is to say, lives of the ‘queer’ or (as they have later come to be called) the ‘gay’.* The subject of the last of his studies is Arthur Marshall, famous as the reviewer of ...”

“... opposite are the three large volumes of Edward Nehls’s Composite Biography, a version or two of Harry T. Moore’s frequently revised biography, the first and so far the only volume of the three-tier Cambridge biography, and the ample lifework of Emile Delavenay. There are more beside them, and more to come: Rosie Jackson says there are ten in ...”

“... quotes an excoriation of institutionalised racism, given at a 1943 New York rally on a bill with Paul Robeson and Vice-President Henry Wallace. Welles’s debut as a political orator was as sensational in its way as his first forays into theatre and the movies. ‘Until the other day,’ the New Yorker noted, ‘we regarded Orson Welles as simply an ...”

“... you.’Schwartz was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants. His father, Harry, made a fortune in real estate. Schwartz remembered him dressed in a Palm Beach suit, a Cuban cigar in his mouth: ‘a tall powerful-looking handsome man who looked at others as if he owned the world’. In his epic poem, Genesis, ...”

“... and recognised (his interrogator was the son of a former Spanish ambassador to London). Visits by Harry Pollitt and other Communist luminaries are remembered with gratitude. Visits to hospital are remembered with wry amusement, and periods of convalescence among the civilian population with wide-eyed pleasure. ‘If Spain had pulled through I wasn’t going ...”

“... and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering richness of Wagner’s legacy with an eye on Paul Lawrence Rose’s Wagner: Race and Revolution, a book whose single-minded – albeit forceful and historically well-informed – account of the Wagner phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as violent, revolutionary antisemitism. Reading ...”

“... 1960s. No one seems to be missing. And there’s no shortage of ambient sound. Songs collected by Harry Smith for the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) drift on the air in the first rooms; in the last, we can hear Paul Bowles’s recordings (1959-61) of traditional Moroccan musicians. Beaubourg’s trophy exhibit is ...”

“... or it can make pseudo-epic. Does J.G. Farrell take the Celtic line in The Siege of Krishnapur, and Paul Scott follow a more plodding and literal Anglo-Saxon formula in the four-novel sequence of The Raj Quartet?There might be something in that. I suspect, for one thing, that those who cannot read Tolkien find Paul Scott ...”

“... a passing reference to one of the principal figures of Doctorow’s 1975 best-seller, Ragtime: Harry Houdini, the escape artist. In a story called ‘The Leather Man’ the narrator, a policeman, is reminded of Houdini as he watches a girl doing weird gyrations in the midst of the crowd at a rock festival. Studying the film of her movements that he has ...”

“... the PM had given the order to sink the Belgrano. But Mr Pym was speaking in a different context. Paul Daniels, who was also a guest, said: ‘Something strange is going to happen.’ From that day on all the radio and TV channels seemed to be talking about me. Convinced I was already a celebrity I thought a Rolls-Royce that skidded to a halt a few yards from ...”

“... cricketers, Bob Cherry and Tom Merry (Simon Raven’s favourite), and the manly, righteous Harry Wharton. On the darker side, smoking and slacking behind the fives court, were the bad boys, ugly and envious – Darcy, the chinless wonder, Bunter, the gross and hideous glutton, Vernon-Smith, the rich but vulgar bounder, Skinner and Stott, the loathsome ...”

“... from at least 1951 (and matters were to get worse). But it would also have been untrue to itself. Harry Levin described Principles of Literary Criticism as a ‘methodology of doubts’. At the same time as extolling the richness of signification in poetic language, Richards endeavoured to devise systematic means of reducing that potentially plethoric ...”

“... worthy series. He is revealed as the most treasonable of clerks, a compound of Waldheim, de Man, Harry Lime and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his ...”

“... act’. (The school insisted she see a psychiatrist or leave.)At eighteen, she eloped with Harry Mathews, later known as the only American writer in Oulipo, and they played a bohemian version of house: seeing two or three movies a day, eating crummy Chinese food, reading in bed and singing Edith Piaf in the shower together. They moved to ...”