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“... Nora Barnacle’s hotel might well have been lost on Beckett. He specialised, after all, unlike Henry James, in allowing many things to be entirely lost on him. Like Wilde, he belonged to that group of Protestant geniuses who thought they should speak up just as their land-owning and money-owning colleagues were clearing out of Ireland or learning to keep ...”

“... Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got to know Francis when he designed some furniture for my Eccleston Street flat. I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it … In ...”

“... the book is constructed in a series of emotional confrontations, the chapters being given (as in Henry James’s ‘dramatic’ novel, The Awkward Age) the names of the leading actors in each, and the ‘awkward age’ being in this case nearer 67 than 17. The plot concerns retirement and homecoming, ending and reconciliation, and the Welsh setting as Amis ...”

“... for so long, as it would be to find a death certificate, or the lack of one. I phoned the Head Porter and explained that I had once lived there and was now wanting to write about the place.‘You won’t be knocking on any doors, will you?’ he asked when I arrived. ‘We’ve got a lot of old people here.’I explained it was just the corridors I was ...”

“... her playmates to the children of Harvard professors. As an infant, she was placed in the arms of Henry David Thoreau (apparently he couldn’t tell which end of the baby was which).In 1877, she met David Todd, a ‘blond with magnificent teeth’, who was then working in Washington alongside the distinguished astronomer Simon Newcombe. Her parents had ...”