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“... volumes were to be found on the shelves of their fathers’ studies. They were also attached to Jack London and Jules Verne; they were romantics who embraced the real-life sagas of polar explorers with the same fervour as the fictional adventures of Verne’s Children of Captain Grant. You might think that the sudden arrest of their parents as ...”

“... There’s no doubt that Jack Trevor Story was a dab hand at titles. Man Pinches Bottom, One Last Mad Embrace, Little Dog’s Day and Live Now, Pay Later are good enticements and accurately indicate the plot, predicament and even the moral of each novel. His most famous title is still his first, The Trouble with Harry (1949), thanks to Alfred Hitchcock, who acquired the film rights for $500 but made a classic film out of a shabby deal ...”

“... attractions’. Widowed young, she had turned, like thousands of others in late Victorian London, to prostitution. One of her clients had taken her for a spree to Paris, and she had started to call herself Marie Jeanette. She was also nicknamed Ginger. She lay with her head ‘turned on the left cheek’. One arm was across her stomach, the other ...”

“... universal than that description suggests. The new nation also needed a great Irish painter, and Jack Yeats, brother of the more famous W.B., was seen to supply the need. The question whether he was just a great Irish painter or a great painter haunts this book. If you think of him as a gifted artist with an inextinguishable interest in depicting the posture ...”

“... shows Harriet, who is married to a rich businessman much older than herself, travelling out of London on the Brighton line. The suburban houses by the tracks strike her as ‘poignantly homely, beautifully unassertive’. She pictures herself in one of the houses, sitting by the French windows with a cup of tea and ‘listening to a serial on the ...”

“... given a distinct image of Theroux as a novelist. He has set them in Kenya, Malawi, Singapore, London, Dorset, Cape Cod, and now in Honduras; and produced as many different kinds of novel. Graham Greene ranges as widely, but the Greene themes and style impose them selves; and Theroux has written on V.S. Naipaul’s themes. Apparently his own work doesn’t ...”

“... of the movie he is still going strong, eating Christmas pudding while Lulu is being murdered by Jack the Ripper. Perhaps there is such a thing as an homme fatal, the indestructible buffoon who represents scruffy, cynical reason. At the trial, Lulu’s lawyer seems half in love with her himself, and so is almost too persuasive about the impossibility of her ...”

“... In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Beckett in 1938, Thomas McGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art ...”

“... to play rugby league, aspired to be a painter. ‘By commuting for a year between art school in London and rugby club in Leeds,’ the journalist Jasper Rees wrote years later, ‘Storey fashioned for himself a life of a double exile in which no one at either polarity quite understood him.’ He studied at the Slade, and was a decent student under William ...”

“... Nicholson to Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast. Both artists were married: Hepworth to the sculptor Jack Skeaping, whom she had met while on a scholarship in Rome, and Nicholson to the painter Winifred, who stayed behind at their farmhouse in Cumbria to look after their two small children and new baby. At Happisburgh, where the other invited guests included ...”

“... bursts, the memories of each of a dead man’s friends alternate with scenes from the present. Jack Dodds, a ‘master butcher’ from Bermondsey, is on the bar of his local pub, in a jar of ashes. He was about to shut the shop, buy a bungalow in Margate and start a new life with his wife, when he went down with ‘a touch of stomach cancer’. In a ...”

“... has an equally sharp eye for the fakers – one of the essays in his collection Letters from London (1995), a great kebab of a book, is entitled, simply, ‘Fake!’ – since he is himself an accomplished compactor and confabulator. He mixes and mulches his glistening raw material, squeezes it into novelty-shaped moulds and palms it off as the real ...”

“... space with us, my parents and my brother and sisters, in every house I remember. It was with us in London, moved with us to Nottingham and crossed the border with us into Scotland when I was five. We had to bunk up two to a room in the early years in Dundee, my siblings and I, but there was always a place for the leopard. When we dispersed to university, we ...”

“... trust in land speculation as the route to wealth’. Some effects of this are well known. London houses (mine and Wolf’s among them) rose ten and more times in value over twenty years. Here was an unearned increment with knobs on (and dado rails and cornices): all we had done to earn the money – often more than our salaries brought in over the ...”

“... The item which seems set to stay longest with me from Ian Jack’s alert and precisely-written record of British life in the Seventies and Eighties comes from the opening memoir of his father, which supplies a deeper soil, or subsoil, to the son’s coverage of more recent matters for the Sunday Times and (since Wapping) the Observer: Few of his workplaces survive ...”