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“... was boredom. Most people were interesting first time round. ‘Wednesday 9 July 1941: Lunched with Michael Foot, whom I liked very much. He hated and hates Chamberlain even more than I. His views, though a trifle too leftist, are sound.’ But they did not turn out to be permanently palatable. ‘Friday 3 October 1952: After dinner we watched a political ...”

“... life. Certainly the letters exhibit him at the top of his form as an extravagant, debt-ridden young dandy and adventurer. There are, too, some vivid letters to his family in 1830/31 from Gibraltar, Malta, Corfu, Albania, Greece, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo and Alexandria. Many of them have been already published, either by Monypenny and Buckle, or in ...”

“... man. She also liked to make jokes at the expense of fellow guests: wit was no more approved of in young ladies than sexual cravings. The Improvisatrice was followed by The Troubadour (1825), which went through four editions, then The Golden Violet (1826), The Venetian Bracelet (1829) and The Vow of the Peacock (1835): these books were all set in an imagined ...”

“... In 1995 Michael Howard, the Tory Home Secretary, dismissed Derek Lewis from his post as Director General of the Prison Service and appointed David Ramsbotham Chief Inspector of Prisons. Lewis then wrote a book about his experience – Hidden Agendas: Politics, Law and Disorder (1997) – which reflects very badly on Howard ...”

“... or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie.’ Cavell, whose own ‘odd education’ took place in part at the Berkeley cinemas where Kael worked as a programmer, put it in more positive terms: ‘To be drowning in the ...”

“... by his friend, Pavel Tchelitchew, who had introduced him to Gorer. Before his passage to Africa, young Gorer had already published The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade and his mood was still dandy-left, rive-gauche, smoothly dissident and shocking. Africa Dances is now reissued as a paperback, in regrettably abbreviated form, with no pictures. We ...”

“... the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage. Donovan didn’t put his name forward and years later fails even to recognise him at a cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes ...”

“... explicating Neo-Impressionism when it emerged in 1886 (he coined the term); and after Seurat died young in 1891, Fénéon surveyed his studio assiduously, preparing his posthumous reputation. Fénéon cut a dashing figure on the literary scene too, animating several journals, attending Mallarmé’s Symbolist salon and editing Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Amid ...”

“... was when we talked about the fact that I still played and he didn’t (‘Of course, you’re young … ’; 90 could say that to 62). We talked a bit about cricket when I would go round in the evenings (‘Yes, come round: I can still drink’), but mostly we talked about literature, which is to say mostly I tried to get him to talk. I was, am, too ...”

“... the economy bags.’‘Someone came in on Christmas Eve and asked for banana leaves,’ the keen young product manager over in fruit and vegetables told me, ‘and you know something? We had them.’You would have to say that Sainsbury’s is amazing. It has everything – 50 kinds of tea, 400 kinds of bread, kosher chicken schnitzels, Cornish pilchards ...”

“... Queen’s House, the ‘castle’ that Vanbrugh built for himself, the Georgian crescent of Michael Searles’s Paragon – and while Dulwich is less monumental, it does have John Soane’s Picture Gallery and the buildings of Dulwich College, ranging from mannered Georgian to Barry’s lurid neo-Gothic, with the remnants of the Crystal Palace nearby ...”

“... architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly ...”

“... In​ 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit on his leather jacket. ‘You’re my favourite band! I love you!’ a 20-year-old Sid Vicious slurred, as his idols were hurried to safety ...”

“... Beirut, escaping the sun to browse the books on politics in the Virgin Megastore. A stack of Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country is in front of me. Across the street is the tent city that protesters against the Syrian presence in Lebanon pitched soon after the Valentine’s Day assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister. A few ...”

“... III. Imagine my surprise when, in the tube from Heathrow, there came in and sat down opposite me a young and rather austere woman who was reading, with the appropriate detached bespectacled air, the latest of the Ricardian Society’s Bulletins. And she wore, like some pop-star badge, an enamel medallion exhibiting a boar – the emblem of her favourite ...”