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“... in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her as their ‘most underrated author’ in the TLS and she was taken up in a flurry of publicity, interviewed on radio and TV. Quartet in Autumn, the novel she had on the stocks, was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker prize and new ...”

“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... about capitalism or racism, your own complicity in both or either. Whether you are aunt or wife or cook or freemartin, all women are equally oppressed.Nowhere in the constitution of this utopia does it say that although yes, of course, it’s true that women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy most certainly are under attack in the US at present, the ...”

“... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...”

“... appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without ...”

“... a friendly US vice-consul who granted hundreds of visas breaching State Department norms. Thomas Cook, Fittko remembers, were issuing bogus transatlantic tickets to help people on their way – at 200 francs a shot – and the Chinese were selling entry permits at 100 francs. Birman and her friends had visas for Mexico. What nobody who needed to get out of ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... particularly on chat shows – got wilder and longer so that one had the nauseating spectacle of David Frost, for instance, standing supposedly touched and surprised by the audience’s unexpected warmth, the shouts of the PAs now become whoops. This quickly became standard and a customary feature of live shows today, particularly Graham Norton’s, with the ...”

“... purvey to the Ministry [of Information] the raw meat and vegetables and for the ministry to cook and serve the dish to the public’. At a cabinet meeting, he deplored ‘the unrelieved pessimism’ of BBC bulletins and their ‘long account of ships sunk’. Reporters​ soon understood they had to be cheerful. Dimbleby’s BBC colleague Charles ...”

“... of her artistic achievements. Her domestic regime was supported by a major-domo, two maids, a cook, a gardener, a houseman-cum-assistant gardener and eventually a chauffeur. As Philip Waller remarks in his extraordinary compendium of turn-of-the-century literary life in Britain, ‘Corelli’s sense of grandeur was the inverse of her sense of the ...”

“... black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and political ...”

“... asked. How precisely had he obtained his discharge? Was it true that he had murdered the ship’s cook?’ There were also rumours – Freud blamed Spender for spreading them – that, after this stint, he avoided being conscripted because he couldn’t handle being separated from his cat. ‘Stephen always embroidered. That’s how it got about. My strength ...”

“... is not Consequences but a cookbook compiled (loose word, since she merely instructed the palace cook to cough up some recipes) by the maharajah’s aunt. The Elysian – and this makes it unique among book prizes – seems not to stipulate that it is a prize for published books. The discussion of the judges’ panel in the book revolves around the question ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”