“... black anklelength crombies no burden: the perfect day for a funeral. Walking down towards Bethnal Green, through Haggerston Park and over Hackney Road, I appreciate the unnatural, expectant stillness – dispersed by the fretting of traffic that is already beginning to snag up. Outsiders, transients, put it down to road works; an extension of the tarmac hole ...”

“... manners has done the reputation of the Library little good, perhaps because the dark red and Gucci green of the window furniture and sun-breakers make it seem more aggressive than the same material used next door.) The Library is a new neighbour and I wonder how it will get along with the others on the street. There is one irony: the new library has come from ...”

“... strands in Small Holdings (in which a one-legged former museum curator wrecks a park in Palmers Green, apparently for the sake of love) and Five Miles from Outer Hope (in which a young South African Army deserter comes to an island off the Devon coast). Wesley is a serial disturber of small communities. He made four appearances in Barker’s 1996 story ...”

“... in it than I had ever seen in the prismatic purple; under this was a coloured arch, in which the green was so predominant, that I could not distinguish either the yellow or the blue: still lower was an arch of purple, like the former, highly saturated with red, under which I could not distinguish any more colours.Langwith then went on, as Raymond Lee and ...”

“... and small print and, though provided with new introductions in 1994 and supplementary essays by Peter Ackroyd and Germaine Greer thereafter, is still based on a text prepared by Peter Alexander in 1951. It is surely not a coincidence that the RSC is the same price as the hardbacks of the revised Oxford and the Complete ...”

“... selling tickets for a benefit concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I ...”

“... places. The sequences featuring three eventually famous friends, James Prior of Northern Ireland, Peter May of England, one of its cricket captains, and William Rees-Mogg, late of the Times, are among the tightest and funniest things he has written. May is present, while utterly silent, as a batsman of genius, and as a figure of fun and a pillar of rectitude ...”

“... up on me. Mr Knocker put me down for a hairdresser and a Protestant. But there was always my Uncle Peter, a die-hard Celtic supporter – not like my brothers, but a real Celtic supporter, the sort who thought Rangers fans should be sent to Australia on coffin ships, or made to work the North Sea oilrigs for no pay – and Uncle ...”

“... struck him as ‘bizarre’, in that the interview took place on the day her husband, Peter Robinson, went to Downing Street to accept the role of First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly ‘and there really was a sense that Iris had stolen his thunder’. Black, who was hired as her political adviser, does not say when he decided to ...”

“... hard it is not to call her Beryl!) feels a nervous sympathy with a remark made by the producer of Peter Pan in her previous novel, An Awfully Big Adventure: ‘I don’t want any truck with symbolic interpretations.’ Characteristically, she doesn’t want to look serious, and people who don’t look serious tend not to be taken seriously. (She is generally ...”

“... a foreign country, where things are differently done. I had not encountered the Tennessee novelist Peter Taylor before, and this book came as something of a revelation. As a writer he has the gift, which seems both wholly natural and yet to go with a very conscious discipline and decorum, of putting the reader calmly inside his world in his first few ...”

“... act of Russian history is about to begin: Putin and Medvedev will pop off-stage into the Moscow green room, switch costumes, and re-emerge to play each other’s roles. Putin as president, again, Medvedev as PM. It’s the apotheosis of what has become known as ‘managed democracy’, and the ultimate triumph of the show’s writer-director, Putin’s ...”

“... out all too clearly the unevenness of his character and achievement. It is tactfully introduced by Peter Quennell, a friend described by Pope-Hennessy elsewhere in the volume as ‘amiable as always, but fundamentally antipathetic’. Mr Quennell does not disguise the less agreeable side of his friend’s life, but prefers to leave it to the letters to reveal ...”

“... Lansbury Drive, Hayes, where she grew up. From pavement level, she could sense the weird electric green of a neighbour’s ivy, the bitumen skies and the pervasive tang of pollution from the M25, under construction throughout her childhood. In 2014, she lay down again, naked and surrounded by a cordon of fellow protesters, on the service road in Delhi where ...”

“... Mrs Wrayburn, like Fred’s sisters and mother, who stitch banners in the purple white and green of the WSPU, will gain less from the changes to come than Daisy, who has nothing to lose and is already quite tough. When Kelly, the journalist who has cost her her job, meets her as she sets out for Cambridge, she lets him propostion her. ‘He put his arm ...”