“... town. He was maybe our unluckiest genius.’ (It’s hard not to see echoes of the career of Peter Cook, who also peaked early: he reached the limits of his marvellous talent while still in his twenties, and thereafter turned to drink to cope with the sense of anti-climax, the inability to top – though why should he? – what was already a matchless ...”

“... respected. The apparent mess has an aesthetic as well as a pragmatic logic. Mise en place, the cook’s meticulously arranged supply of standard ingredients, is ‘the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck with a line cook’s “meez”.’ Nor with his knives, or his pans, or his carefully hoarded hillock of ...”

“... would arrive home and have supper organised and beautifully cooked – he was a very accomplished cook and we, Charles and I, became very accomplished at washing up! Happy days together broken by my getting married in later 1956 (and still getting cooked for). John had a marvellously dry sense of humour and always a pithy comment, ever an academic. Nigel Bell ...”

“... went soddenly to bed – soddenly, but not too far to lose their conceit. And then all day I’d cook and wash the dishes and chop the ice and weed the garden and type my husband’s poems and quarrel with him. Nevertheless, when he finally left her for another woman, Stafford had a complete breakdown and went into the Payne Whitney clinic for nearly a ...”

“... pleasure that remains to me: I indulge in reading about movies with undiminished enthusiasm. David Thomson has written about his disappointment with contemporary cinema, about how the franchise movie and the blockbuster are killing Hollywood and his hopes, and because I am one of the legion of Thomson’s devoted fans, it cheers me up to hear it. If he ...”

“... night on stage. Here is Reeves entangled with various young women; here he is falling in love with David Diamond, a composer who was a shadow figure in their marriage. I am thinking of a place called 7 Middagh Street, a fairytale brownstone in Brooklyn Heights whose back windows looked out onto New York Harbour and the Brooklyn Bridge. It was demolished in ...”

“... With his attendant expert, Dr Daniel Solander, a gifted pupil of Linnaeus, Banks joined Cook’s Transit of Venus expedition to Tahiti aboard the Endeavour in 1768-71, outspending the Admiralty by a factor of two and a half in outfitting his personal entourage of draftsmen, assistants and servants. On his return to England, Banks reigned as one of ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... it. The servant meddled in everything: barred visitors she thought would not be wanted, told the cook what to do, interfered with the maid, pushed in to answer a question Livy had asked the postman. Twain paints the scene in 2000 words with the sort of care another writer might devote to the battle of Waterloo, but the real object of his attention is ...”

“... 11 January. It’s not to disparage David Bowie, but if even a fraction of the tributes being paid to him and his influence were true we would never have had a Conservative government or indeed any government at all. Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots ...”

“... Strategy, a firm co-founded by Vote Leave’s head of communications and a former speechwriter for David Cameron, whose clients include Citibank, Spotify and Deliveroo. In all, according to analysis by the New Statesman, more than four times as many lobbyists as teachers ran for Parliament in July.The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby ...”

“... and lions, with titles like ‘The Old Warrior’ (a lion, not a Masai). These are the work of David Shepherd and Simon Combes, who have donated reproduction fees to wild-life conservation funds. They are relevant to the text, in which the Baroness zestfully celebrates the beasts she killed, and also relevant to the tears of the moviegoers, enchanted by ...”

“... horses are quietly snorting, they’re all Kuban Cossacks here, they eat together, sleep together, cook together, a splendid silent comradeship. They are all more or less peasants, in the evening they sing songs that sound like church music in lusty voices, their devotion to horses, beside each man a little heap – saddle, bridle, ornamented ...”

“... do well to take up Voltaire’s practice of reading everything that he writes out loud to his cook, or his cat. Ondaatje’s high stylistic and – as we shall see – moral seriousness asks to be taken down a peg or two. This done, The English Patient remains pegged near the top of the board. It is an exceptional book, and perhaps it could only have ...”

“... little purpose. There is not much sign that Labour has learned the lesson. The new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is in some ways the worst possible choice. From what he has said so far it is evident that there will be the same dishonesty about crime, the same boneheaded attitude to drugs, the same belief that a Labour Party just re-elected with a majority of ...”