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“... You don’t remember the lessons, you remember the teachers. At the heart of Gillian Avery’s book are the distant, half-familiar figures of extraordinary women, pioneers: Frances Buss of North London Collegiate, Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham, Frances Dove of Wycombe Abbey, Lydia Rous of The Mount. ‘A pupil at The Mount remembered saying loudly: “Well, I hate her ...”

“... She had been run over and was now in a coma. ‘I’d castrate them,’ said Delia, whose name was Jackie. ‘Who?’ ‘Hit and run drivers.’ ‘That wouldn’t help,’ said Mrs Donaldson’s Cora. ‘It would help me.’ ‘She was always stepping off the pavement.’ ‘Nobody is disputing that, Cora, only he didn’t stop. I’d castrate ...”

“... at the time and ought to have grown out of such silliness, another notable casualty of which was Jackie Kennedy, with whom Adlai Stevenson asked the cast of Beyond the Fringe to supper in New York in 1963. They went and I didn’t. Never spelling it out to myself, I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to ...”

“... of books. This was Carolyn’s current reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of ...”