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“... It was a Sunday morning, and a minister strode past me with a labrador. ‘That looks like a contented spot,’ he said, dog and dog-collar glistening. I sat in the middle of a little wood, just to the side of Kenilworth Chapel in East London, on 9 October 1994. The church looked closed and unattended. All around me, in tangles of ivy and nettles and scrub, lay hundreds of dilapidated grave-stones ...”

“... Ifirst​ walked along Brewer Street when I was 13. I was looking for a shop that sold film posters. It’s a long story, a four-hanky number, and it started in Glasgow the previous summer when I bumped into a busload of visiting Californians. I’d got talking to a woman who told me her friend had once been Marilyn Monroe’s nurse – I’m not making this up – and we swapped addresses ...”

“... It’s​ often the minor characters in British literature who appear as workers, usually larger than life, like music hall artistes. Dickens, of course, could see the public entertainer in just about anybody, but he was unusual in making people expressive of their jobs, and his novels display a panorama of the gainfully employed. In his fiction, there are twelve merchants and twelve nurses, 47 clerks, three milliners, four editors, three pawnbrokers, thirteen housekeepers, six inventors, two stationers, a postmistress and a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy others ...”

“... On​ his deathbed, Saul Bellow asked a question of himself that he might have asked at the time of his first novel and his first marriage: ‘Was I a man or a jerk?’ You could say it’s a good question for anyone to ask, especially someone who wrote 18 books and had five wives. Next to Norman Mailer, who did equally well on the spouse-mongering front, Bellow was a worker of slow, monkish application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book ...”

“... Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah. Jackson is said to have become a Muslim (which is sure to please his critics on Good Morning America), but evidence would suggest he has yet to get the hang of Islamic custom ...”

“... Nijinsky began to lose his mind in a Swiss village in 1919. He was only 29 years old, still dazzling, animal-like, an Aschenbach vision on the Lido, a young man who could jump and pause in the air: but he began to spend all night in his studio scribbling the same things over and over, the doodlings of the incrementally mad. The thing he drew was eyes ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”

“... A spokesman admits that the cancellation of the Saturday night sleeper from London to Aberdeen ‘until the end of time’ is a bitter blow for those who like to wake up on a Sunday morning to the munching of Highland cattle, but there can be no question of having the train back, say the men at Euston. They can’t find a single soul who’ll agree to work the shift ...”

“... on family business. Julian sent me a message while I was in the Highlands saying ‘Big up, Mr O’Hagan,’ a reference he knew I would get to what a convict had written to him in prison: ‘Big up, Mr WikiLeaks.’ Other than that, and a few hellos through Sarah, we hadn’t spoken since the day he agreed to start writing. I rang Caroline on 9 May and ...”

“... who may have torpedoed, among many British ships, the HMS Forfar, the ship my grandfather Michael O’Hagan went down on in December 1940.’ ‘Would you pass the butter?’ he said. Coming down the corridor, backstage at the Public Library the next evening, Norman had the two sticks and the Ugg boots but he seemed very thin, even more so than when I’d ...”

“... It was getting dark one sulphurous evening in Glasgow in the winter of 1990, when a pop-eyed cultural apparatchik – almost breathlessly ripe from a Chinese paper-lantern parade she’d just led through the naked streets of Carntyne – sat down beside me in a bar to the side of the City Chambers, to gab about the glories and horrors of Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture for that year ...”

“... her to a job at the Singer factory. And in six months’ time Margaret and Hugh were married in St Andrew’s Cathedral. A rapid cloud of starlings blew over the seven bridges. Margaret was different. Her family were gentle people. They liked to put pictures around their house, and the flowers of the field on the kitchen table. Her father read from novels when ...”

“... I’ve never met​ anybody who hated as many people as Lillian Ross did. She would count their names off on her fingers, regularly within spitting distance of them, and her voice wasn’t quiet and she wasn’t shy. Bending back each digit and making a face, she’d offer a defining word after each name:Gloria Steinem – phoneyJanet Malcolm – pretentiousRenata Adler – crackpotSusan Sontag – nobodyNora Ephron – liarOther hand:Kenneth Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands ...”

“... At the juvenile detention centre in Kandahar there are two sets of children. The first are riotous and loud, arrested for theft and other crimes of that sort. When you give them a piece of paper and ask them to write down the reason they are in prison they simply scratch lines into the paper or scrunch it up. They can’t write. The second group are silent ...”

“... In Westminster Abbey a couple of years ago, I stood for over an hour talking to Neal Ascherson. It was one of those freezing January evenings – cold stone, long shadows – and we adopted our BBC faces in Poets’ Corner, looking at the memorials and marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo somewhere in my head, two lines from The Pleasures of Hope ...”