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“... It is gratifying to have a book reissued after 25 years. My A Hermit Disclosed was first published in 1960.* At that time I was not allowed to mention the names of certain people who were then alive, or I felt it diplomatic not to do so. Therefore I used pseudonyms. Now I can say that a character I called Lady Kathleen V – was Edith Sitwell. She and I became friends eventually, but for a while I was in hot water ...”

“... My first ayah was a Burmese murderess called Mimi. Our servants were murderers.’ I do not recall Raleigh Trevelyan slipping this information into the lunchtime conversation when he was my publisher (a very helpful and tolerant one – interest duly declared). He was born in the Andaman Islands, the penal settlement run by the Raj off the coast of ...”

“... as far-reaching a significance as syphilis. How it got to Britain is a mystery. The legend that Raleigh brought it home from Virginia does not hold water: Raleigh never visited Virginia, where, in any case, the potato did not grow. Another legend persistently posits a shipwreck – a remnant of the Armada with potatoes ...”

“... was also political: an attempt, characteristic of the decade, to narrow what Julian Trevelyan, a fellow collagist and M-O activist, called ‘the gulf of education, language, accent and social behaviour’ that separated conscience-stricken Cambridge graduates from the working class. In the summer of 1937, Jennings spent some time in Bolton (the ...”

“... one by Millet in the style of a Dutch genre painting and the other Millais’s The Boyhood of Raleigh: two different attempts, Strong notes, to re-imagine the past in the present. As with many of his contemporaries, however, his great revelations came in the cinema. He was enchanted by Leslie Howard in Korda’s Scarlet Pimpernel and even more by Vivien ...”