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“... financial arrangement was part of the deal with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa ...”

“... of war. The comic potential of Auden’s rackety life has famously been drawn on in these pages in Alan Bennett’s ‘The Wrong Blond’, a review of Dorothy Farnan’s memoir Auden in Love; Davenport-Hines, I told myself, might well be less indulgent. As it happens, I was dead wrong: Auden is a work of impassioned praise, less a biography than a literary ...”

“... Literary​ fans, as Alan Bennett once remarked, can be off-putting for the rest of us. Certain writers’ books get ‘fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them’. Between 1956 and 1981 Mary Renault published eight novels set in ancient Greece that made her enormously, wildly popular ...”

“... painting on the other side of the fireplace is Queen Victoria at Osborne, a copy of Landseer by Gilbert Sprague (the original is in Osborne House) and, if anything, even gloomier than the original. Here again is John Brown – the faithful Highland ghillie – holding the reins for Victoria, who is sitting side-saddle on a pony, reading a letter (more are ...”

“... Sergeant Frank Troy, Mr Woodman.’In 1938, Honor’s sister Patricia married another Tory MP, Alan Lennox-Boyd. From this point, the Diaries give an unmatched account of clandestine queer life in that era. Channon developed a passion for having a ‘Turker’ or Turkish bath, not always for the purpose of losing weight. At the Royal Automobile Club there ...”

“... Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the grandness of the occasion with a score that incorporated blues and jazz ...”

“... Ernö Goldfinger or the LCC’s Architects’ Department, but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased ...”

“... emerged from the intelligence war with some important and lasting friendships including those with Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, Guy Liddell and Dick White, who after the war became the head of MI5 and then MI6 – an invaluable contact. And Trevor-Roper enjoyed the company of Kim Philby, whom he found the most intelligent and sophisticated of his ...”

“... more disobliging self-portrait has any writer left than that in the first chapter of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold?In fact, people have always in one respect considered him to be a deviant. He belonged to a generation many of whom considered class divisions to be a blot on our national life, and who consequently resented those who used the old social barriers ...”

“... the former first sea lord, who had made his fortune in railway bookstalls and was immortalised by Gilbert and Sullivan as Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore: ‘Stick close to your desks and never go to sea/And you all may be rulers of the Queen’s Navee!’The naval arms race brought around previous sceptics such as Lord Salisbury and, later, the young ...”

“... those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly employed on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the culverted Hackney ...”

“... we are enabled to see the highest development of the modern artistic spirit.’ Two years later, Gilbert and Sullivan caricatured Wilde in Patience as a ‘greenery-yallery-Grosvenor-Gallery-foot-in-the-grave-young-man’. When Basil Hallward completes his portrait of Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel, Lord Henry Wotton says: ‘It is your best work, Basil, the ...”

“... the next offensive in the desert war; in the Anglican All Saints’ Cathedral, designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott; the British Embassy with its immaculate lawn sloping down to the edge of the Nile; the Turf Club, an all-male establishment lifted straight from Pall Mall.And there was the Gezira Sporting Club, a vast pleasure ground occupying the southern half of ...”