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“... were Radio 1 car stickers on Ford Sierras. There were conservatories being added to the strains of Simon Bates’s mid-morning show. There were big and tidy back gardens, on hot Saturdays, ringing with the amplified chuckle of Dave Lee Travis. I was 12 or 13. I’d stay in the car when my parents went to the garden centre, trying to get a better reception on ...”

“... is the kind of thinking involved. Balfour-Paul is very good at giving an idea of how dyers think; Simon Garfield is not so successful with his organic chemists. Mauve is about William Perkin, and about what followed from his discovery. As it is possible, at a pinch, to trace the achievements of all the chemical industries which once used coal and now use ...”

“... something practical, what right have you to it as subject-matter? What can you possibly say? Simon Garfield had qualms when writing The End of Innocence, a factual account which should, on the face of it, be useful: spreading the word, disentangling the truth, demythologising, softening prejudice. It is objective about difficult issues – how, for ...”

“... In 1939 she moves to an isolated cottage surrounded by acres of woodland deep in Buckinghamshire. Simon Garfield first came across Pratt as one of the anonymous volunteers who kept a diary for Mass Observation, the organisation set up in 1937 which sought to capture the mood and mores of the British public; he included her in three earlier anthologies of ...”

“... say “A friend of mine just died” doesn’t mean anything any more,’ the historian Simon Watney said in 1994, but that network is qualitatively and quantitively specific to how gay men live. Deaths in those networks mean deaths of whole areas of memory and association. Death for most heterosexuals means family deaths most of the time, up to the ...”