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“... Rather​ D.J. Taylor than me, when it comes to untangling the unbelievably complicated and messy love lives of the so-called Horizon circle: the people who clustered adoringly around Cyril Connolly during his years as editor of the short-lived literary magazine (1939-50). Was Connolly still carrying on his affair with Diana Witherby when he started his affair with Lys (while still married to Jean and while Lys was still married to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that relationship last?Taylor wades deep into the cigaretty fug of that small literary circle awash with till-boredom-do-us-part love affairs conducted in rented accommodation ...”

“... On​ 24 March 1953, the day on which, at 10.20 p.m., Queen Mary would breathe her last, a 43-year-old Jamaican jazz musician called Beresford Wallace Brown, who had arrived in England in 1950 and now worked in a dairy in Shepherd’s Bush, was trying to put up a shelf on which to perch his radio while redecorating the ground-floor kitchen of 10 Rillington Place, where he was an upstairs tenant ...”

“... Jan Struther to the end of her days. Her double life is the central theme of her granddaughter Ysenda MaxtoneGraham’s often moving biography. Jan Struther was the pen name of Joyce Anstruther, a tomboy figure who was very much the embodiment of her own favourite word, ‘zest’. In 1923 she married a Lloyd’s ...”

“... Arriving at the houses of my interviewees,’ Ysenda MaxtoneGraham writes in Terms and Conditions (2016), her account of life at girls’ boarding schools between 1939 and 1979,all ready to fire away with a question about how many Bunsen burners the school had in 1952, I was often assailed by a sharp memory to do with knickers: knickers that had to be worn over knicker linings; the difference between summer knickers and winter knickers; the humiliation of one’s knicker elastic ‘going’; the desire to conform and wear the official school knickers rather than the slightly different type one’s mother chose because she didn’t hold with going to the official uniform shop; the time someone had to write a letter of apology to the school laundry because she said she had sent her knickers to the wash but in fact that had been a white lie; knickers that only went to the wash once a week, and bloomers that only went once a fortnight ...”