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“... It’s​ a long story, but I once ended up at dinner with Margaret Thatcher. It was a warm evening in June 2003 and Bill Deedes, the illustrious former editor of the Telegraph, was celebrating his 90th birthday at the Carlton Club. I had got to know him a few years earlier, on a Unicef trip to Sudan, and we ended up spending time together, first in Kenya ...”

“... The day before Remembrance Sunday the people in Oxford Street told themselves to remember there were fewer than 50 shopping days until Christmas. Even in our down times, London is a formidable shopping Mecca: the people who weren’t in Oxford Street that day were possibly at the new Westfield Stratford City, a shopping mall the size of a small invadeable country, where even the security guards were impressed by the military effort being put into the laying of a red carpet for the premiere of the movie The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part One, for which fans, or Twihards, as we fans like to say, started queuing three days early ...”

“... were applauding this year’s Dr No, or applauding the world’s first truly stateless news feed, Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, was to be found on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, giving Assange what for. ‘By muddying the waters between journalism and activism,’ Exum wrote, ‘and by throwing his organisation into ...”

“... It can be​ quite frightening, having to be somewhere by a certain time. We make it more bearable by not giving it too much thought, yet being on time is often judged, particularly by the punctual, as representing one’s ability to hit the mark as a human being. In 2017, Alex Honnold, the American free-climber, scaled El Capitan, a 3000-foot rockface in Yosemite, with no harness and no ropes ...”

“... Epstein as her abuser but claiming she’d also been told to have sex with his friends Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz. Who were the ‘potential co-conspirators’ granted immunity under the Florida plea bargain? All the named parties have denied the allegations, but the question of ‘Jeffrey’s friends’ is now at the heart of the case. The ...”

“... It was​ in Charles Dickens’s upstairs sitting room that I met the future king of England. The Duchess of Cornwall was wearing a red paisley silk coat and dress by Anna Valentine. I know that because I was peeping out of the window and heard a lady from the Daily Mail say so into her mobile phone while she stalked the pavement outside. We were about to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth, and of course the royals were late, and we, the curtain twitchers of Bloomsbury, had been working overtime ...”

“... I find​ it hard to believe that Harper Lee was actually in favour of publishing Go Set a Watchman, a rejected manuscript that lay among her papers for more than fifty years. Yet the book is now here and doing exactly the kind of damage that its wily author always felt it would. For a novelist, it’s one thing not to destroy a book and another thing to publish it, and the work they are calling the ‘publishing sensation of the year’ is merely a pre-hash of something that came to be known for its polished good nature ...”

“... At​ the rehearsals for Cinderella, the choreographer was clapping out the beat while ten young dancers jumped and twirled. It was a festival of Nike socks, North Face joggers, Calvin Klein T-shirts and scooped up hair. It wasn’t a Glasgow I’m accustomed to seeing. The hall was littered with pumpkins, baskets of apples, a trolley with three geese sticking out of it ...”

“... Coco Chanel​ died in her suite at the Ritz Hotel on 10 January 1971. Her funeral, held a few days later, caused a traffic jam on the rue Royale, with throngs in front of the Madeleine desperate to catch a glimpse of the departing coffin. The church had originally been conceived as a monument to the glories of Napoleon’s army, and remains a favourite with battle-scarred artists ...”

“... Alfred Dickens, the novelist’s brother, wrote a General Board of Health report on the area soon to be occupied by the Olympic athletes, recording that ‘the cholera raged’ and there was ‘neither drainage nor paving’ – ‘in winter the streets were impassable.’ More recently it was a site of old warehouses and weedy dereliction. It smelled of the oil and paint and chemical effluent that had leached for years into the land around the Hackney Marshes ...”

“... There’s a certain sort of person who will take a flashlight and go into a field of corn in the dark, but they only exist in the movies. I always think of those characters when I think of movie people in general: even in what is called real life, where people tend to have opinions and heart conditions and mortgages, film directors are largely unreal people who behave in unnatural ways ...”

“... I used​ to lose several items a week. It was to do with being young, part of the psychopathology of everyday life, then it stopped. Maybe you stop losing small things around the time you start losing big ones – parents, countries, friends – but I haven’t lost a bank card in ten years and I used to lose ten a year. In my twenties, I was forever dropping keys and leaving coats in cloakrooms, or spectacles on bars, and I still wonder if the things I’ve lost would better describe me than the things I kept ...”

“... Ionce​ drove to Forest Lawn Memorial Park. It was before Michael Jackson had his crypt there, but I remember finding Walt Disney’s grave and that of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. A few writers are there too: Theodore Dreiser, who wrote well about department stores in Sister Carrie, and Clifford Odets, who believed shopping was one of America’s chronic diseases ...”

“... I think it likely – or slightly more than likely – that Peter Saville is the only English graphic artist to have had an actor play him in a major motion picture. The film, 24 Hour Party People, was entertaining in the way that films full of intense people with good accents and daft haircuts always are, and Saville comes off quite well, the genius of the piece in fact, which is probably saying quite a lot, since the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s (the setting for the movie) bred self-proclaimed geniuses in the way Sheffield used to produce knives and forks ...”

“... Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The sign could say: “Up here, something did happen to Andrew O’Hagan. Like each of us, he wondered if it would happen. And it did.”’ Something happened to my second ever schoolteacher, Mrs Wallace. We saw her totally somethinged in her coffin under a huge crucifix of Jesus Christ, to whom, by the look of ...”