“... the only man she knew who wasn’t a bastard. I tried to work on that. Look, there are a lot of nice men out there, don’t let this thing spoil your life. Only white men are nice, she said. Or some of them. Not all that many, I said. I was walking on the slopes of Table Mountain that weekend when the call came through on ...”

“... then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the task of reclamation about two generations earlier than the Caribbean writers who identified – if one can nowadays put it that way – with Europe, specifically England. Their literary industry, centred largely in London, only really ...”

“... the favourites: Even more than the better-known The Forest Lovers I loved The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, about King Richard the Lion-Hearted, published in 1900 ... the medieval romances I was writing at top speed on an empty stomach were meant to be in his manner. I cannot remember whether I showed any of them ...”

“... associated with St Ives, where, as the critic Lawrence Alloway wryly noted, ‘the landscape is so nice nobody can quite bring themselves to leave it out in their art.’ Critical debate was lively and healthily factionalised, with Patrick Heron upholding a formalist approach in opposition to John Berger’s advocacy of realism. Berger not only promoted ...”

“... other version have ever been dream towns; they take too long to mature. Venice can’t have looked nice for its first few centuries. The last of the social arguments against suburbia, and a fortiori against sprawl, is that it abets segregation. Cities, if Richard Sennett is to be believed, are places where you are forced to ...”

“... before seen in this country. At times, indeed, it was going up by a thousand a month, which, as Richard Tilt, the director general of the Prison Service, has pointed out, requires a new prison every three weeks to house the intake. If Howard’s Crime (Sentencing) Bill goes through Parliament, it will add between 10,000 and 30,000 prisoners to the present ...”

“... John Bolton, the role of empire-minder has been taken over by Democrats and the anti-Trump media. (Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, accordingly averred that any withdrawal from Syria is as unthinkable as withdrawal from Germany or Japan would be. Having those permanent garrisons abroad ‘keeps countries from doing things you ...”

“... Summer Holiday (1962), in which, as in successive bus-laden movies, Elborough reminds us, Cliff Richard and the young ones board ‘the wrong bus’, an RT then being easier to buy from London Transport than an RM. During Carnaby Street’s heyday, it appears, any red double-decker with an open platform to sing and caper on would have done the ...”

“... know on our behalf and pass the information on in such a way that we can absorb it. Well, it’s a nice idea. But reports on the wandering womb, the dangers of masturbation, relative racial brain size, cold fusion, food safety, weapons of mass destruction, the death of the author, suggest that it’s a hit and miss sort of strategy for getting an accurate ...”

“... the sun always shines and all backgrounds have become foregrounds: Garbo chattered away. She was nice. I liked her better than ever before. Later she drove me back, shooting all the Stoplights. But the afternoon was more memorable than she was. Isherwood’s books, like the lives within lives of Hindu and Buddhist doctrine, are deposits of the ...”

“... called ‘Our Precious Isles’, like a half-remembered allusion to John of Gaunt’s diatribe in Richard II, conjuring the ‘sceptred isle’ and ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’ popular with mawkish patriots who for some reason always stop quoting the speech before they get to the bit about England being ‘now bound in with shame’ having ...”

“... is called up and shunted from one arm of the Services to another. The Lasts live on a ‘nice little estate’ and their house has an oak-panelled hall which is the diarist’s especial pride. They run a car until mid-1942. So far, so ordinary. Mrs Last busies herself mightily to raise funds for hospital supplies and prisoner-of-war parcels, and ...”

“... writers are only thinly present as physical and emotional beings – Louis the historian and nice old gent, randy Lynda, her husband Richard with his withered arm, Ruth who specialises in prison documentaries. This supporting cast rarely interact in their own right and are brought on mainly to bitch at each other ...”

“... When Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, on 7 November 1944, I was still a student and I regret that I never had occasion to take a drink or three with that wit, charmer, womaniser, tosspot, home-wrecker, author, journalist and master Soviet agent. I had better luck with my friend Kim Philby, Sorge’s only serious rival (that we know of) for the title Spy of the Century ...”

“... then ‘Audrey pointed to one of Elizabeth’s enormous jewels and asked: “Kenny Lane?” “No, Richard Burton,” replied Taylor, and both stars screamed with laughter.’ It blows my mind – I don’t know a more proper way to say it – to imagine Hepburn pointing to Taylor’s jewels, as if the two were simply women at a party, not symbolic figures ...”