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“... to the Compendium (very gracefully translated by the Oulipo’s senior foreign member, Harry Mathews): ‘An Oulipian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape.’ A year after sharing in the foundation of the Oulipo, Raymond Queneau published what remains to this day the purest example of its intentions, a slim ...”

“... Fair (it appears, with a short biography, in the recently reissued In ‘Vanity Fair’, by Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini).* When she was 20 she was painted by G.F. Watts, who was besotted with her and called her his Bambina. At the height of her notoriety she was caricatured in Punch and elsewhere. In her last days she had a deathbed photograph taken of ...”

“... article revealing that Helen Demidenko’s real name was Helen Darville and that her parents were Harry and Grace Darville, from Scunthorpe. The story was big enough to move the recent death of a very famous Australian Rules footballer (known as ‘Mr Football’, he received a state funeral) off the front page of Murdoch’s Melbourne tabloid, the Herald ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is to betray Britain.’ On 14 September the Party published a pamphlet by general secretary Harry Pollitt entitled ‘How to Win the War’. It declared: ‘To stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases while the fascist beast rides roughshod over Europe, would be the betrayal of everything our forebears have ...”

“... One of the strong points of Beckett’s book is its wealth of portraits of individuals, among them Harry Pollitt and Johnny Campbell; Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, two of the very few who found a way into Parliament; Palme Dutt the Swedish-Indian, more theologian than political thinker; and Bert Ramelson, a Ukrainian-Canadian, who became a very able and ...”

“... a Labour government, given that the overwhelming majority of newspapers are anti-Labour; or how Harry Truman was able to win his Presidential election when only 4 per cent of American papers (measured in terms of readership) supported him? There was a newspaper poll in the Forties which showed that a majority of Daily Express readers thought that the paper ...”

“... benign among proprietors, has come and gone, picking up a peerage in the process. So has Victor Matthews, moving from building-site to Fleet Street and out again in less than ten years. The free or cut-price offers of dictionaries and flower-pots in the 1930s have given way to bingo and cash prizes. As for content, most of the popular papers are as cheap ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... both forces de-proletarianising what had been an essentially working-class body. In the 1950s, Harry Pollitt could still veto the appointment of the middle-class former student George Matthews as his successor and insist on the worker John Gollan. Some twenty years later the industrial organisers of the Party were a ...”

“... names, just as the middle classes in England at the end of the 20th century turned to Jack, Harry, Max and Ben. Whatever his real name, the fact that scholars in the Hellenistic period found it unbelievable that the great philosopher could be a ‘Plato’ – they preferred that his real name be Aristocles, ‘Famed for Excellence’, after his ...”

“... then my father, Philip, called Phil but Phishel at home, from his Hebrew name, Feisal; then Jack, Harry, Sid, Dave and Louis. Their father was a tailor, one who earned too little, with all those mouths to feed, to be able to buy shoes for his children to wear to school. At 13 or 14 my father got a job in a billiard hall, and thereby became a useful ...”

“... are likely to stir tabloid echoes in the reader’s mind, and before too long the name of Shannon Matthews will pop up – but Hensher is too wily to follow that case very closely, and enjoys laying a trail that combines real clues and pieces of misdirection. The trick of incorporating genre features into a literary novel, to judge by such successes as The ...”

“... the article is Graham Greene chasing Fidel Castro all over Cuba, the way his Holly Martin pursued Harry Lime all over Vienna in The Third Man. He doesn’t know yet that his Caribbean hero is actually the villain of the piece. Greene writes about Celia Sanchez, a feminine factotum of Castro’s, and Haydée Santamaria, a professional procer of the ...”