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“... of wife-swapping in New England against the backdrop of the Vietnam War sinks my heart like a stone to the riverbed of my body; even so, I can say with reasonable assurance that the book is bad. Something chants behind the prose, even when it’s good: waste, waste, waste, waste. Sodden somehow, as if the sad Old Fashioned that Janice was drinking at the ...”

“... am Mrs Sabawala,’ an Indian admirer announces. ‘My house on Malabar Hill is a sermon in stone. Lunch with me tomorrow.’ He takes part in a gala at the Foreign Office to celebrate the visit of the French President in March 1939: ‘It was a tremendous affair, the last of its kind before the war and I could not help referring to it afterwards as the ...”

“... into hospital at once. It seems that I was quite ill (a ‘very severe’ case). I had lost three stone and was dehydrated. It had taken six weeks to gain admission to hospital and I felt as if I was going down like the westering sun. I went into the surgical ward and waited on a drip for 72 hours for an operation. It seems that Nature has provided us with ...”

“... and chips, tea and bread and butter 1/9), with Schofields slightly higher up the scale. There was Harry Ramsden’s at Guiseley, where we would often have just chips when we went hiking across the fields to Burley in Wharfedale. What I don’t recall is any longing for food (or for elaborate food) that coloured the everyday. On the contrary, what sticks in ...”

“... writes under the buckskin-evoking pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy ...”

“... on Bull Wharf, east of Queenhithe; the other at Beech’s shop on Lambert Hill. Merry’s servant, Harry, absconds in fear and spends the night in a hayloft in Three Cranes Yard, while Merry takes Beech’s dismembered body across the river to the Paris Gardens and dumps it in a ditch. On this errand he would have landed on the South Bank at the Falcon ...”

“... my cut-glass maternal grandmother as the ‘Fast World War’), a very messy affair which had made Harry Clack’s lungs turn green. Harry worked in the potting sheds of my mother’s ancestral home and hacked up an eternal spew of mustard-gas phlegm. This got him out of going to the second war, which was a replay of the ...”

“... the grass outside the south door had been replaced or supplemented by a patio not even in York stone but in some fake composition. Inside, draped in front of the altar was a gaudy banner advertising the Richard III Society. This I rolled up and had I had the means would have destroyed. I wrote to the CCT, who generally do a decent job, but was told the ...”

“... the richly three-dimensional charm of Farrell’s earlier heroes: the Collector, the Magistrate, Harry and Fleury, and the Major in Troubles who presides distractedly over the numerous Anglo-Irish family and guests at the Majestic Hotel.Farrell’s three structures are all based on siege situations, which gave him the right setting, tempo and psychological ...”

“... Valera received a telegram from Chief Rabbi Herzog of Palestine: ‘REVERED FRIEND PRAY LEAVE NO STONE UNTURNED TO SAVE TORMENTED REMNANT OF ISRAEL DOOMED ALAS TO UTTER ANNIHILATION IN NAZI EUROPE GREETINGS ZIONS BLESSINGS.’ Herzog followed this in January 1943 with a long telegram which referred to ‘five million threatened with extermination’. De ...”

“... with his brother Frank, describing Galway as a grand little magic grey town full of sensitive stone and bridges and water. We … spent a day walking on Achill right out over the Atlantic … Altogether it was an unforgettable trip and much too short, through bog and mountain scenery that was somehow far more innocent and easy and obvious than the ...”

“... up by their father to believe that their Uncle Henry in England was slightly silly, but now, as Harry James, William’s son, read these letters he was deeply impressed at their tone and their gravity. He wrote to his sister Peggy: It will, I rather think, make Uncle Henry count very much more than he did already. For it’s full of literature as well as ...”

“... notorious as the place to get rich quickly, if you could do so before succumbing to the climate. Harry Verelst thought that £30,000 would be ‘sufficient to set down with myself and also to serve my friends’, but George Vansittart advised his nephew to get £60,000. The impeachment in 1787 of the former governor-general, Warren Hastings, was intended to ...”

“... legacy, after all. What Happens in Terry Stays in Terry. Emblazoned on the slip of paper was a Harry-Potterish list of aristocratic-sounding titles that Mavis seems to have invented for the three of us (me, my sister and herself) for reasons unknown. Honorifics one might call them, or perhaps, horrorifics. Now I should explain that in my mother’s eyes ...”

“... Worn-out, jet-lagged, tied to itineraries, he lost touch with the elemental basics of Glanmore (‘stone, slate … cold water, open hearths’) and felt reduced to ‘the “mask” of S.H.’, a ‘mascot’. The public celebration of his seventieth birthday, he told one of his most trusted correspondents, the historian Eamon Duffy, left him ‘feeling that ...”