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“... It had a playfield on two levels, connected by ramps and a mystery score activated by a bonus lane. The Black Knight’s voice used to issue out from somewhere behind the backglass, challenging you to further combat. The ‘Black Knight’ is a collector’s piece now, but if I could find one of these marvels and afford to buy it, then I think that the ...”

“... from the finish, on Saturday 13 September. I have set my heart on a banner stretched above her lane. Six months ago I stopped drinking. I never did drink during the day, or drink spirits; I drank spritzers. I could easily drink two bottles of wine an evening. There were small physical things: I had some numbness in my ankles for three years – the doctors ...”

“... at the cistern house of the Fleet River; on a weekday morning now, the glass and chrome of Shoe Lane is full of suited twentysomethings. A few minutes’ walk up Fleet Street brings you to Number 188, to the west of St Dunstan’s Church, opposite Ye Olde Cock Tavern, and in an echo of Peter Blayney’s central themes (the business of books, and the ...”

“... but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of idolatry. Such connections ensured that ...”

“... stylistic tropes and flourishes, moreover, which today would have her travelling on the fast lane to Pseuds’ Corner, were in that more exuberant age perfectly acceptable as sober comment. H.G. Wells liked Rebecca West’s The Harsh Voice, which appeared in 1935. This would not be at all surprising – the four short novels of which it is composed were ...”

“... carry the People in their rucksacks. Primus inter people is the founding director of Charter 88, Anthony Barnett, whose book attempts to recapture for his constitutionalist tendency the drama of ‘our constitutional revolution’: ‘“we the people” – to use a long-coined phrase that may finally become currency in Britain – have changed, especially ...”

“... dark, as the nearest street-lamp is half a dozen houses away. The cobbled paving of Church Lane is no longer white with snow, the sleet has left great gobs and trails of slush, like monstrous spills of semen, glowing in the gas-light. All else is black.’ This broad-brush work, using the favourite colours on Faber’s palette (dark phlegm and pale ...”

“... the courts. While ‘comming out of the church’ in Hunstanworth (Co. Durham), Roger Doon denied Anthony Ratcliff’s accusation that he was a thief. ‘Although ye be a gent., and I a poore man, my honestye shalbe as good as yours.’ Ratcliff was horrified: ‘What saith thou? Liknes thou thy honestye to myn?’ He ‘lyftyd up his hand at Doon’, but ...”

“... of Micaiah Walker, tailor, and his wife Martha, née Hilditch. The family was of Dorset origin: Anthony Walker, Sarah’s grandfather, was born in Lyme Regis. In religion they were Nonconformists. In 1816, they moved into a large, rambling and probably rather scruffy house, 9 Southampton Buildings, between Chancery ...”

“... limitations but sympathise with his condition. Who wouldn’t ‘wish him well’, as the critic Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times did? And who, if only in fantasy, couldn’t identify with him? Rain Man meets Rocky, to play with Juilliard parlance. (Conservatory pianists used to call Rachmaninov’s Third Rocky III. David, according to Gillian, calls ...”

“... reason now for Moore to fight shy of being a war artist.War artists’ art, like the war novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, was stronger on boredom, home-front detail and character than adventure and horror. Nobody expected a Guernica – or if they did they didn’t get one. No Goya or Otto Dix emerged – the drawings Ronald Searle made in a Japanese ...”

“... Hill is green, wooded and unrecognisable – the chimney of the kiln on what would become Pottery Lane is the only identifiable landmark. The studio of the photographer played by David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow-Up is on Pottery Lane. The Grove sweeps down into Notting Dale, and passes several of the large communal ...”

“... is unsigned. Is this sinister machination, or merely a proofreader’s oversight? The second is Anthony Blunt’s account of Tomas Harris, whom he describes as ‘artist, art dealer and intelligence officer’. What wistful, envious or remorseful sense of irony prompted Blunt to remark that Harris perpetrated ‘the most successful doublecross operation of ...”

“... of Shakespeare’s Wife, I can’t imagine that any biographer will ever again dare suggest (as Anthony Holden recently has) that Ann was ‘a homely wench’ who may have ‘set out to catch herself a much younger husband by seducing him’, or that Shakespeare married her only because she became pregnant after ‘a careless roll in the hay of a summer ...”

“... that pull the community together, like doodlebug yarns in wartime. The Cypriot tailor in Dalston Lane, who still operates in the jaunty ambience that sent the Krays sailing to their fate in schmutter that made them look like Romanian secret policemen dressed for a perpetual wedding, recalls the incident in a decommissioned shop guarded by a pit ...”