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“... Harold Macmillan, Harry Crookshank, Oliver Lyttelton and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World War ...”

“... possibly Lady Godiva’s grandson. It may also be that Harold wasn’t quite the ‘people’s prince’ that Wood claims. In 1052, in the course of the quarrel between Edward and his father, Godwin, he came back from exile in Ireland to raid Somerset and Devon, killing many of the shire-levies who opposed him, and went on to ...”

“... whom were proposing to advance the dynastic claims of Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, against ‘Harry of Lancaster, usurper of England’. Nor had the ghost of Richard II finally been laid to rest. As late as 1419 the King was ordering precautions against ‘that fool in Scotland’, who, the Lancastrians claimed, was still implausibly impersonating the ...”

“... is shown by the porousness of the boundary separating it from the novel as such. Even before the Harry Potter books were published with two sets of covers to fit the self-images of two overlapping readerships, Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer, marketed domestically as a children’s book, could be published in Italian translation as for adults. The Young Adult ...”

“... to repulse the other hand. Even Hofmannsthal’s bottom came in for commentary, from the diarist Harry Kessler, who used to notice such things; unkindly and anti-semitically, he observed ‘its levantine tendency to breadth’. Given a person of such acute, so to speak, personal interest (despite the Broch-delighting ‘suppression of self’), one of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of those books you can’t help ‘casting’ as you read. It’s a pity about Warren Oates, but Harry Dean Stanton is still around, and it might be worth getting Dennis Hopper’s name onto the credits. Highway 61 runs north to Memphis and the soap-opera mansions of the Drug Barons. Ely has the good taste not to include a music track. But the space is there ...”

“... were a direct representation of Vivien(ne), which I couldn’t understand since in the play only Harry sees them (‘You don’t see them, but I see them,’ he claims), whereas Priestley’s point was that Vivien would storm unexpectedly and embarrassingly into parties where everybody could see her. As for the poem, it seems to have been a fitful series of ...”

“... the miracle that stunned the fire-worshippers; here was the Bodhisat in royal state as a prince; the miraculous birth; the death at Kusinagara, where the weak disciple fainted; while there were almost countless repetitions of the meditation under the Bodhi tree; and the adoration of the alms-bowl was everywhere. In a few minutes the Curator saw that ...”

“... and his ‘fidgety ghost’ – the phrase comes from one of his Pericles-inspired poems, ‘Young Prince of Tyre’ – still haunts Australian poetry. One pictures the poet lugging a battered second-hand typewriter from flea-pit hotels to temporary lodgings, watching through sleepless mosquito-plagued nights (‘Now/Have I found you, my Anopheles!’) under ...”

“... to ask if I was the young person referred to in Dalton’s account of a Sunday lunch party at Harry Walston’s house at Newton in the early Fifties. Oh yes, I said brightly, and prattled on for several minutes about the pink champagne, the eclectic company (the unsinkable Woodrow Wyatt still Keeping Left in those days), Dalton’s booming political ...”

“... a Thief. But he had gone too far: in Monaco, while making To Catch a Thief, Kelly was noticed by a prince. The magic of actress and beholder really could work – but not for the master. That made a mortifying English joke. Hitch wanted Grace still. For years he tried to tempt her with projects, even as late as Marnie in 1964. But the protocols of the court of ...”

“... a struggle to the death. After the Communist leaders Govan Mbeki (Thabo Mbeki’s father) and Harry Gwala were released from jail, in 1987 and 1988 respectively, Ramaphosa became an intimate of theirs, and when Kgalema Motlanthe too was released he gave him a union sinecure. He even provided Gwala, a self-described Stalinist and one of the most ...”

“... Cimmie’s death in 1933, her other sister, ‘Baba Blackshirt’ Metcalfe, who was married to the Prince of Wales’s equerry, ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe. Poor Fruity was a faithful member of the British Fascisti and had to put up with being cuckolded not only by Mosley but by Count Grandi, Mussolini’s man in London. Somehow Mosley managed to make his adoring ...”

“... July. A book review in the LRB by Jonathan Coe of The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson edited by Harry Mount kicks off with some remarks about the so-called satire boom of the early 1960s. It recalls John Bird’s The Last Laugh, the Cambridge Footlights revue of 1959 (which I saw) and while recognising that it was too radical to be very funny, claims ‘it ...”