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“... avalanche of revisionism, for his ‘Centurion of the Thirtieth’ stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill draw a close and clear parallel between the end of the Roman Empire, when according to all accounts Arthur must have lived, and the putative end of the British Empire. The thought proved insidiously attractive, especially to writers who were themselves ...”

“... kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1981), Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from ...”

“... saw more action than the Mini and she would tootle off in it on a Sunday morning, park on Primrose Hill (‘The air is better’) and even got as far as Hounslow. More often than not, though, she was happy (and I think she was happy then) just to sit in the Reliant and rev the engine. However, since she generally chose to do this first thing on Sunday ...”

“... Three’ bookmaking firms that dominated the market (the other two were Ladbrokes and William Hill). I was a cashier, which meant I took in the bets, made a record of them (using a fairly rudimentary photocopying system) and paid out to the lucky winners. Behind me and a couple of other cashiers sat the manager, a kindly, depressive middle-aged man who ...”

“... the Mall every time. Lloyd Bentsen, the prince of Capitol influence-peddlers, gets the Treasury. Alan Greenspan, the reactionary fan of Ayn Rand, who has roosted at the Federal Reserve these many years, is beseeched to ‘stay on’. Winston Lord, an old Kissinger hand, gets the Asia desk at State. Les Aspin, a plaything of the military contractors, is ...”

“... being thought homophobic paralyse your judgment? (I attempted some such mischief in my novel Box Hill.) Discussing Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, Germaine Greer remarked that reaction to the novel would have been rather different if the narrator’s love ...”

“... Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.Under cover of night, my brothers and I crept around town ...”

“... carries over, deepening invention rather than confining it. Readers of his first novel, Golden Hill, could almost believe they understood the intricacies of 18th-century American monetary practice, unless called on to explain it themselves. He has admitted to a tiny slip in that book, the mention of liquorice as a confection rather than a medicinal root ...”

“... of emphasis on personal appearance, almost as if he had no talent’, though Terry Wogan and Harry Hill are commended more warmly. He signs off with a bulletin on his Pacific War novel: he might not live to write it, but ‘I would not be able to do the things I do now, and might do next, if I had not done those other things first.’ All the same, there’s a ...”

“... of males, a character created from a mixture of Mr Rochester, Clark Gable, Casanova, the late Alan Clark MP, and – apparently – various dashing and extant English aristocrats, including Andrew Parker Bowles. Rupert Campbell-Black, wealthy landowner, sometime world champion showjumper, sometime Tory MP and sports minister, exuder of brio, glamour and ...”

“... support themselves while he was in theory an undergraduate by setting up a general store in Boars Hill outside Oxford, the landscape across which Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy had wandered the previous century, and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in ...”

“... hadn’t seen it and chattered on how lovely this field was and slipping nearer came this terrible hill. Someone ran down the slope, waving his arms, a figure big and filthy, a miner, a coalman. He slid down beside them. ‘Oh,’ she said placidly, ‘here’s your father,’ and he sat down beside her, coal and muck all over her white frock. Then they were ...”

“... intellectuals, alien Jews and international pederasts who call themselves the Labour Party,’ Alan Bennett had Richard Hannay, Buchan’s most famous hero, muse in Forty Years On (1968). Another West End send-up of The Thirty-Nine Steps finished a nine-year run in September 2015, a century after the final instalment of Buchan’s best-known novel appeared ...”

“... American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an ...”

“... though one of her legs was two and a half inches shorter than the other. In the 1930s, the young Alan Turing went skinny-dipping off the rocks, photographed by an enthusiastic housemaster.Sark’s appeal remains its rugged coastal scenery, sunshine, peacefulness, birds, butterflies, dolphins and absence of carbon monoxide. Artists have come for 150 ...”