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“... 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 ...”

“... The​ opening ceremony is now a familiar occasion on which state-sponsored creativity can be given an enthusiastic public airing, most often in the company of expensive fireworks, assorted pixies, the occasional high-kicking nurse, and members of the thespian community who look like the 1980s never ended. Just the other day I thought all my Christmases had come at once, or all my Brigadoons, when I took my place in Celtic Park for the opening of the 2014 Commonwealth Games ...”

“... I can’t be the only person who remembers the 1970s in Britain as a prolonged downpour with a single burst of sunshine. There were 55 million people living here, but on certain days, walking between the rubbish bags that were waiting in the puddles for action from Jim Callaghan, one could feel like the world had gone awol, like Miss Trinidad and Tobago ...”

“... Some years ago I went to see the coroner at St Pancras. It was a bright afternoon, and daylight poured in from the old graveyard, a place that, in those days, had no very profound connection with the mainland of Europe, unless you consider the graves of Mary Shelley’s parents (now removed) to summon the connection between France and England more congenially than the Eurotunnel ...”

“... The art of throwing a sickie doesn’t get the recognition (or the funding) it deserves. Even the straitlaced and well-attending would admit that it takes panache to get away with it on a regular basis. Bupa discovered that the most common excuses used by those phoning in sick were food poisoning and flu, though it also found that the majority of managers didn’t believe them ...”

“... Was there a time when people didn’t know what other people were thinking? I can vouch for the fact that there was: it lasted, roughly speaking, from the dawn of man until the launch of YouTube. In the 1970s, if you wanted to know what other people were thinking you might read a novel, but to do that you would have to make a journey to a bookshop or a library or borrow it from another human being ...”

“... Iopened​ the window to let in some air. Hotel windows can’t always be opened. Some hotels don’t believe in fresh air, or they believe it’s too expensive, if the price of having it is accepting the risk of people smoking (or jumping). On the fourth floor of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, windows open over a secret courtyard, and I could hear what sounded like an old TV broadcast, the voice of Peter Jennings saying it was a historic moment ...”

“... Harold Pinter once remarked that a writer who stops taking buses is likely to lose touch with the people’s speech. I can’t say whether this was true or not in Pinter’s case, though I was with him once in the Café Anglais when he took exception to the waiter’s way of speaking. PINTER: I’ll have the fish toast with the parmesan custard. WAITER: No problem ...”

“... The​ male peacock has never had a free pass. ‘Of all handicrafts,’ the satirical magazine the Town said in 1838, ‘that of tailoring appears to be the most successful in the way of coining money. We might compare it to witchcraft.’ According to Bespoke: The Men’s Style of Savile Row by James Sherwood, even Queen Victoria got in on the act, writing to her son Bertie that ‘dress is a trifling matter,’ before adding: ‘we do not wish to control your own tastes and fancies … but we do expect that you will never wear anything extravagant or slang ...”

“... According to the Los Angeles Times, people may have ‘a basic setting on their happiness thermostat’. So don’t blame your current depression on your ex-wife, your sullen children, your forgetful old father, poor exam results, a bad hair day or a piss-poor speech by the pope. Depressing real-life events come and go, but your general capacity to feel gladness is fixed ...”