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“... Somewhere around the time of the second season of The Sopranos, people at dinner parties stopped gossiping about their friends’ sex lives and started talking about American television shows, later designated ‘box sets’. Nowadays, it’s all anybody ever talks about, and the quickest way to feel old or out of it is to find oneself unable to speak, in detail, about why Jeremy Piven is so brilliant as the agent in Entourage ...”

“... Becoming a British citizen is a significant life event,’ the former home secretary David Blunkett writes. ‘The government intends to make gaining British citizenship meaningful and celebratory rather than simply a bureaucratic process.’ The quote is not from Blunkett’s diaries but from the funniest book currently available in the English language, published by the Home Office, and called Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship ...”

“... It’s not easy to believe, but people used to think the Oscars didn’t matter. Now the hoopla takes up half a year, much longer if you take into account that many actors, writers and directors begin mugging for Oscars the moment they agree to a project. In previous times a respectable number of the nominees didn’t turn up at all, but now they would sooner be wheeled in semi-recumbent on their sickbeds than forgo the occasion altogether ...”

“... The Queen once detained me as I tried to get into an ice-rink. It was one of those hot days in the summer of 1977, and the portly Mr Waddle, or Akela as we liked to call him in Jungle Book parlance, took a pack of us to the Magnum Leisure Centre. I was feeling a bit down as I only had one cub scout badge (for housekeeping) and I thought I might get another one pinned to my jumper for careering across the ice in my toggle and cap ...”

“... We are told that the average household’s electricity usage goes up 100 per cent during the summer holidays, the result not of air-conditioning but of an almost total aversion among today’s nippers to the bee-loud glade, in fact to the great outdoors in general, which appears to be a place rather badly equipped to compete with video games called things like ‘Wasp Attack IV ...”

“... Writers have seldom been strangers at the scene of an execution. As we know from his London Journal, James Boswell would think nothing of tipping up at Tyburn after a bit of the Old Peculiar on Westminster Bridge – horror was an essential part of the 18th century’s entertainment diet. The death vigil was known more recently in Britain: think of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, and those crowds in their charcoal overcoats waiting at the prison gate for the gruesome note to be posted ...”

“... There was a drawer in every room of our house and in every drawer there was a white pamphlet. On the cover it said: ‘Who, Me?’ My mother had placed the pamphlets there in the hope that when my father tried to find a corkscrew or a book of matches he would see the bold question and finally ask it of himself. I don’t know whether any of my brothers remember this, but I do, or the writer in me does, as if the question was quite fundamental, asking – as I looked for a toy car or the same book of matches – if I had what it would take to make sense of my life ...”

“... If you are an Inuit or a hummingbird, you are very unlikely to die of heart disease, suffer from diabetes, or be extremely fat. You are also unlikely to drive a Bentley down the Brompton Road, but that’s not what interests the world’s top foodies, who look to ruddy Eskimos and buzz-winged birds to explain the success of a diet rich in Omega-3. Foodies are responsible for thousands of books every year, which people buy in droves, expecting to learn the secret of eternal happiness, but by and large these books always have the same message: eat fish and plants ...”

“... It’s my feeling that she looked forward to her tomorrows,’ said Marilyn’s housekeeper, the last person to see her alive. But now we may be in a position to say that Marilyn Monroe’s tomorrows have stretched beyond any known horizon, becoming one of the publishing world’s core subjects. More than six hundred books have been produced about the late movie star; that’s more books than you’ll find on Florence Nightingale, Princess Diana, Boadicea and Julia Roberts put together ...”

“... People say serious writing is akin to painting. Or music. They hardly ever say it’s like maths. Or quantity surveying. But the art form that literature most closely resembles is acting: the same fascination with character and ideas, the same obsession with voices and identities and silences. Dickens, we know, used to practise impersonating his characters in the confines of his study, mugging before the mirror in order to perfect the rascally sneer of Bill Sikes or the effeminate moue of Old Mr Turveydrop ...”

“... I don’t have many regrets in life, but the ones I do have run very deep. For instance, I find it very hard to accept that I have never had a valet. My grandfather didn’t have a valet, my father didn’t have one, and now it looks like I won’t have a valet either. That’s a helluva lot of no-valet in one family. On the other hand, it probably means I’ll hold onto my many shocking secrets, for it seems the role of valet has long since gone from being one where he presses your Y-fronts and shines your buttons to being one where he spills the beans big time ...”

“... Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures on Elocution was once a great hit in Edinburgh. The other Thomas Sheridan, known as Tommy to the tabloids and to friends and enemies alike, is the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, and his efforts to represent himself in a defamation case against the News of the World has been providing the city with a theatrical spectacle the Edinburgh Festival will struggle to equal ...”