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“... was powerful enough, I avoided power. Then Mark stopped being the editor and there was Godfrey Smith, and then Magnus Linklater, both of whom were very nice. I was then called senior editor. The other day I went to see James Fox, who had the French edition of White Mischief, which I come into. He’d put originally that Francis Wyndham, one of the senior ...”

“... she didn’t write about her second marriage to the homosexual Foreign Office worker Eric Earnshaw Smith, her third marriage to the straying Tom Hopkinson, the palaver over Silas Glossop, the father of her children, her affairs with George Barker, David Gascoyne, Eric Siepmann, Ronald Moody, Basil Nicholson, Ian Henderson ... And she could never write about ...”

“... me, whether Freud sounded different in other translations; but, then again, reading Brill and Joan Riviere and Katherine Jones and Robson-Scott had not been illuminating. I didn’t, in other words, really think that Strachey was the problem with Freud. I was quite happy to be locked up in Strachey’s Freud and the myth of the Standard Edition and assume ...”

“... A wood engraving​ by the illustrator Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the participants are framed in the hallway arch, with the curved wooden staircase behind them ...”

“... of the iconic 1920s gel, a tennis player and a golf champion, a huntswoman and a show jumper, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn or an Olympian (‘Oh! Would I were her racket press’d/With hard excitement to her breast/And swished into the sunlit air’). Esmond was an exact contemporary of Betjeman and they shared many pursuits besides – the niceties of ...”

“... comment on Spanish activity in the Falklands from l774 to 1811. In 1809 Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith reported that Viceroy Liniers had deported the leaders of the Buenos Aires cabildo, or town council, to ‘the Maloinas or Falkland Islands’. In the same year he assured Liniers that ‘Great Britain would aim at neither sovereignty nor territorial ...”

“... to a sort of cool luminous reportage that reminds one of the work of our more storied essayists, Joan Didion or John McPhee. In the past few years the incidence of these big books has increased rapidly: three years ago, Christopher Bram published his Washington tale, Almost History; in 1994, Laura Argiri’s 19th-century melodrama The God in Flight came ...”

“... leave, but by 1976 all their neighbours had gone and they were alone. Their nearest friends were Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. In her essay ‘Quiet Days in Malibu’, Didion described ‘the most idiosyncratic of beach communities, 27 miles of coastline with no hotel, no passable restaurant, nothing to attract the traveller’s dollar’. Moore’s ...”

“... and take herself to the Louvre, to Chaplin movies, to see Madame Pitoëff in Saint Joan. ‘I would wander all over Paris, my eyes no longer brimming with tears, but looking at everything.’ She began writing novels, abandoning one, ‘Éliane’, after nine pages, and sneaking out for a gin fizz at the Jockey with Poupette: after one drink ...”

“... or photographers, so, gosh, Louise Bourgeois and Imogen Cunningham and Berenice Abbott and Kiki Smith and Cecily Brown and Marlene Dumas and Ida Applebroog and scores of others get knocked out at a stroke. (Nicole Eisenman – please know I worship you!) Marie Laurencin seems far too feeble to mention; so too, I’m afraid, does Vanessa Bell. Gwen John? Not ...”

“... Prest​ , a former docker, married Vena Creighton in 1961. They had five children, Greg, Joan, Toni, Sharon and Sandra, before divorcing in 1969, when Sharon was three. Depending on who you speak to, Dickie, who died three years after Nikki, was a bit of a rogue, or a thug. I remember him as affable when he chose to be, but with a dash of ...”

“... interpretation she develops, the Rock of Zion and the Romance of the Rose, with the help of Joan Lindsay’s endlessly unsettling Picnic at Hanging Rock. In the 18th century, as she said in her inaugural lecture, Berlin, the capital city of the Enlightenment, was surrounded by a wall, with the Rosenthaler Gate one of only three places Jews and cattle ...”