Born at either Darwen or Blackpool (sources differ) in the English northwest, Harrop grew up speaking East Lancashire dialect in a working-class household on the edge of the Pennines.
His father was a kilnsman and artisan tilemaker whose family had been numerous about Mottram-in-Longdendale for centuries; and his mother was a mill girl who however was intellectually ambitious and eloquent in her detestation of the weaving shed.
The father served as a stoker below decks in the Royal Navy throughout the Second War; he was present in the successful pursuit of the Bismarck and afterwards on supply convoys to Murmansk and Archangel.
He transferred to King's College, Cambridge, but after his years during the 1960s in the Mile End Road and Fitzrovia, that ancient institution seemed, Harrop thought, "theatrical, less than fully grown up" and "a lot like more boarding school".
At Cambridge he was mostly untouched by the afterglow of Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Leavis, but was struck again by the strength of his inherited proletarian culture; his shyness seems to have hardened into a conscious distaste for bourgeois careerism (Marxist thought was still influential in the West at that date).
Harrop ran into difficulties over the unwanted attentions of a homosexual instructor – as he has detailed in his essay 'After Tea with Dr. Hartley' – and he completed his Master's at the University of Toronto.
It continued to strike him as fundamentally unserious: chiefly a middle-class struggle for jobs – which impression was not altered by the inrush during those years of Theory over the top of traditional literary studies.
While on leave in Australia about 1986 he responded to an advertisement for a "government research officer", and found himself being interviewed in St. Kilda Road by employees of ASIO (the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation).
The unhappiness of his personal life has perhaps made it easier for him to maintain the hypersensitive, pained innocence which marks all his writing and which, when allied to his eccentricity of opinion, will seem unpalatable to those who insist on a light quiche-and-salad in preference to strong meat.
His emotional directness can jar on occasion, and can be prey to a certain linguistic excess, which seems strangely Victorian in one who has an evident admiration for Imagism, for the 'masculine' style of early Hemingway or of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and whose chief reading lies among their modern successors male and female (Beckett is a hero of his, and contemporary favourites include Coetzee and Mantel).
Abandoning his extensive library, he has renewed his commitment to writing since that catastrophe, settling in his sixties with his third son at a Pashtoun village about a day's journey from Lahore, Pakistan.