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“... One of the first words I ever heard at school was ‘Bethlehem’. For the pupils at St Winnin’s Primary in North Ayrshire it was infinitely more familiar than the word ‘Edinburgh’ or – starry heavens forfend – ‘London’. We knew all about the little town of Bethlehem and its shepherds who watched their flocks by night: it was the place where Baby Jesus was born, and by Christmas in that first year at school we were trudging through the assembly hall in black sandshoes and towelling headgear, keen to find the infant saviour in a shed draped with fairy lights ...”

“... If​ you enjoy the supreme comedy of literary affairs, it makes perfect sense that the Paris Review was once a blunt instrument of the CIA. Arguably, there’s only so much damage one can do with a Robert Frost interview, but that didn’t stop the late Peter Matthiessen, one of the founding editors, from now and then leaving the office, or the Himalayas, to spy on supposed enemies of the United States ...”

“... Where revenge ought to be slow, artful and elegant, payback is sudden and terribly crude. And when it comes to popular forms of personal justice, one is either Electra, swearing long and subtle revenge for her father’s death, or Clytemnestra, who started the whole thing off by killing Agamemnon in a moment of saliva-curdling jealousy. Some people argue that the king’s wife wasn’t bothered about his bit on the side and that she murdered him because she was guilty about her own ...”

“... On the last day​ of the Article 50 hearing before the Supreme Court, Lord Kerr, one of 11 justices hearing the appeal, looked pointedly at James Eadie QC, who was responding on behalf of the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Kerr accused Eadie of ‘building quite an edifice on the phrase “from time to time”’. It was a fair enough point, and it came none too soon, given that the phrase had been spoken no fewer than 46 times in four days ...”

“... People​ now talk about big drama serials the way they used to talk about classic novels. If there’s one you haven’t caught up with you feel embarrassed, and you might ask yourself, when the conversation swells and you chase your salad round and round, what you’ve been doing with your life. ‘Oh, I missed that’ is no longer an option, as box-sets and catch-up services stare at you day and night, much like that copy of Ulysses that stands on the second shelf ...”

“... The​ other day, I was talking to a man who was once the head of an Oxford college. He recalled an occasion in the late 1950s when he was a student himself and Kingsley Amis had come to address his college’s literary society. When Amis eventually asked for questions, a young woman said something that came as a surprise. ‘Can you give us your “Sex Life in Ancient Rome” face?’ she asked ...”

“... 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 ...”