“... generally anti-religious, but sometimes just opposed to the futile or facile conventions of the day. Sometimes, indeed, what’s subverted is the progressive attitude the author began with. Take Louisa May Alcott, American progenitor of the ‘happy family’ story. (Charlotte M. Yonge had invented the genre in England with her novel The Daisy Chain.) You ...”

“... at the Slade only on the condition that a Rolls Royce dropped her off and picked her up again each day. She spent the 1920s coasting round the Mediterranean with Picasso, Ezra Pound, Natalie Barney and Yeats, and was one of the few women included in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 (although she rejected labels, insisting that her work should be ...”

“... Albert Hall in a blue ribbon, it was hard not to hope that our disdainful visitor was spending the day somewhere else. But where? On every side, there seems to be some Toytown farce in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he make of Martin Bell? Too British to be true, the pair of them, in very different ways. It was ...”

“... of the Soviet management structure and the way the economy worked, but even so you cannot spend day after day with the same person: it becomes psychologically destructive. You may not hate each other, but you do get very irritated. There was a good library in the prison but it had no works by Marx. Marx’s writings were ...”

“... was so taken aback by a cutting remark Maugham made at another guest’s expense that the next day he said to him: ‘I want to make a compact with you. If you will promise never to be funny at my expense, I will promise never to be funny at yours.’ Virginia Woolf later described the character of Alroy Kear – Maugham’s instantly recognisable portrait ...”

“... true!’ exclaims the narrator of the title story, as he tries to dismiss the image of the three-day-old corpse of his wife, which he has just described with elaborate and repellent detail. ‘Art, not life.’ One likes to think so. Many of these stories play dangerously with what one likes to think, with the blurred exchanges between ‘art’ and ...”

“... for what was designed as the first-floor front bedroom. I do my post – about four letters a day – and phone calls, one every day to my confidant Martin Fuller, and start work. At lunchtime I have a bowl of All-Bran. All day I have cups of decaffeinated coffee. At twenty to seven I ...”

“... and sets up as a healer, mystic, masseur and general supplier of spiritual goods. Like a latter-day Playboy of the Western World, he proves both vitalising and disruptive. Fidelma McBride, a young local woman who runs a clothes boutique, has an affair with this charismatic stranger which culminates in a sexual violation so horrific that language threatens ...”

“... a placard which read: ‘Ban the Immorality Act.’ It was a horrible, wonderful sight, and a day of great joy and celebration. When I arrived at Drum in 1967 there were still some major figures in place. There was Stanley Motjuwadi, a writer of the Fifties generation, and Juby Mayet, who had eight children. They became friends of mine, despite my naivety ...”

“... hours to take Austria off the map. German troops crossed the border on 12 March 1938, and the next day, the occupation of Hitler’s country of birth was complete. Hitler rode into Vienna in an open Mercedes, lifting and lowering his right arm while his left hand ‘held tight to his belt buckle’, as Gregor von Rezzori wrote in Cain, ‘as though he were ...”

“... Trans-Siberian railway, a Soviet architect-poet scribbled down for me an example of his work which Robin Milner-Gulland later translated: Why were you late (a few years late)? Or perhaps you were a whole lifetime late? Why is there no time-table for love? And it comes with no bell and no signal ... For the trains there are green signals waiting. The trains ...”

“... give us once again the wishing-cap Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood, And Sabra in the forest with St George! The move from wonder to instruction might seem an inevitable consequence of the move from oral to literary tales. But even a highly literate tale like Alice in Wonderland cannot be reduced to the didactics of ...”

“... borrowed from mid-narrative. This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals ...”

“... in Craven to which my parents retired, and where I still have a house. 8 February, Dundee. A day off from filming An Englishman Abroad and I go to Edinburgh with Alan Bates. We climb the tower near the castle to see the Camera Obscura. The texture of the revolving bowl and the softness of the reflection convert the view into an 18th-century aquatint, in ...”

“... to damage the collection, or to kill fellow Chinese, will prevent PRC missiles falling one day on Taipei. Recently, in another museum in Taipei, as one of an increasing number of cultural exchanges between the ROC and the PRC, there was an exhibition of the only surviving pieces from the hundreds of items of Ming imperial porcelain that were ...”