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“... Beckham, aged six, going as Cinderella to a birthday party at Buckingham Palace arranged by Prince Andrew’s former wife, ‘wearing £240 Gucci boots, a £695 monogrammed cashmere Burberry coat, a £1525 Versace gown and holding a £1200 Goyard leather mini-bag’. For a different approach to success, consider Taylor Swift’s actions during her current tour ...”

“... Steptoe and Son had started on TV.The Samsons lived on the top floor at 115 Rottenrow. The father, Andrew, known to everybody as Sam, was 42, an ex-serviceman. His wife, Jean, was 40. She had been Jane Culross Third in 1942, when they got married at St Mungo’s R.C. Church. They were just round the corner from Sam’s parents, who lived in a tenement on ...”

“... inner, truer self – working for charities after she offered a tabloid reporter access to Prince Andrew for $500,000.Titian-haired Sarah is never far away from Lady Margaret. They are fellow sufferers, bold women who resist the roles thrust on them, and there is no end of vanity in the book’s romanticism, a wish to settle scores, to provide a high-minded ...”

“... about reversing the method used for the picking of teams. I remember the day and the very hour. ‘O’Hagan,’ the PE assistant said, ‘pick your team.’ I walked the few yards onto the field like General Patton contemplating the sweep of his 3rd Army over France. ‘Scobie,’ I said, ‘McDonald.’ And so it went on until every lousy player in the group ...”

“... eventually brought James into nodding and tobacco-loaning relations with my grandfather, Michael O’Hagan, who came from Glasgow’s Calton district. They say James was shy, though, and when people would ask him how come he had two second-names he’d just blush, and mutter something about being quite lucky. Michael protected him, after his own style. My ...”

“... When I made my First Communion, a famously bitter Catholic aunt of mine took me into a side-chapel of our church. She wrapped me up in her arms, right in the middle of all her perfumery, straightened my red sash, and told me I was ‘blessed, blessed, blessed’. Then out of her bag she handed me a wooden crucifix with a luminous lime-green Christ glued onto it ...”

“... A relative of mine, a white-haired Capuchin friar now working on a mission in Zambia, spent the early days of his vocation at St Bonaventure’s, a strict residence a mile or so out of Cork city. There was no drinking, of course, and no cigarettes or newspapers either. When not doing the do – working and praying and partaking of the holy sacraments – the good Reverend Brother would now and then make for the flat roof of the house, from where he enjoyed a decent view of the greyhound racing taking place in a park over the way ...”

“... Howra Station is on the quiet side at 7.38 a.m. A sheet of dust lies on the surface of Platform 13, and there, just under a sign for Horlicks (‘the Great Family Nourisher’), a pair of yellow birds peck and bounce in yesterday’s stomped chewing-gum. The people will come in a minute: the thousands of clerks on trains from the Calcutta suburbs, and dust will cover their shoes and the birds will scatter ...”

“... At the moment the television channel that speaks most directly to young people is ITV2. As I sit at my desk writing this diary, the channel is showing an episode of the American problems-show Sally Jessy Raphael about reckless teenagers. Jenny is 14 and is telling the audience to shut the fuck up. ‘Do you think you are someone who does the right thing in this world?’ asks Sally Jessy, the flame-haired talk-show host who spent her teenage years in Scarsdale ...”

“...  When​ it comes to erotic writing, the more explicit it gets – the more heaving, the more panting – the more I want to laugh. Erotic writing is said to have a noble pedigree: the goings-on in Ovid, the whipping in Sade, the bare-arsed wrestling in Lawrence, the garter-snapping in Anaïs Nin, the wife-swapping in Updike, the arcs of semen hither and yon ...”

“... It has become the odour of the age, flowers rotting in their cellophane wrappers. People began laying them on the steps of St Pancras Church the morning after the 7 July bombings, and within a day or two the steps had been transformed into a slope of glinting paper, the flowers strangely urban behind the police cordon. It was also a slope of words: handwritten messages, emails, shop-bought cards and pavement script ...”

“... Don​ DeLillo has been a catastrophist for so long that we only really get excited when life’s catastrophes go way beyond his predictions. That happened with 9/11, when the attack on the Twin Towers and their collapse in broad daylight made his warnings suddenly appear to have been too vague in meaning and too small in scale. His subsequent fictional account, Falling Man, seemed from the first page like the drowned-out speech of a sandwich-board preacher who has only just learned about the Bowls of Wrath ...”

“... Pincus of the Washington Post felt it was all Julian Assange’s doing (which it wasn’t), while Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times used his CNBC show to say he would arrest Greenwald for seeming to want to get Snowden to Ecuador. Perhaps we should just be grateful that these commentators didn’t form the wellspring of journalistic endeavour in the ...”

“... I don’t think​ the queen liked me. She’d seen it all before, the snooping anti-monarchist with the new tie, so she simply passed me to her husband, who asked if a novelist wrote books. As often with the duke, his question lay somewhere between existential brilliance and intergalactic dunce-hood. I merely smiled in imitation of his lovely wife ...”

“... Coleridge’s​ favourite novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British political fiction. After a life of robust colonial effort, during which he founded the Canadian city of Guelph, Galt – exhausted and impoverished – came back to Greenock and died there in 1839 ...”