“... for suitable premises. A decade ago, when the handsome Public Record Office building in Chancery Lane became available, the law lords turned it down. The natural location now is the Middlesex Guildhall on the west side of Parliament Square, which was built in 1913 and is not a bad piece of design for its period; but the senior law lord, Lord ...”

“... John Hannon in a journal extract published in the Bristol magazine, Entropy. (Hannon describes how David Jay Brown and John Lilly in Mavericks of the Mind ‘discuss the notion that ketamine renders the brain directly susceptible to TV transmissions.’ And goes on that ‘Lilly even claims that he once found himself inside a TV soap opera while on ...”

“... Complaint I’m not surprised at Dad’s reaction when he found it in my bookcase at Wood Lane fifty years ago. In some misguided missionary zeal that makes me cringe even to remember I may actually have recommended it. Because if it shocked him then it shocks me now, though I don’t imagine he read more than a few pages before putting it back and ...”

“... other trappings of an upwardly-mobile prick.’ Marks was into St Katherine’s Dock years before David Mellor. Into the revamped wetlands before The Long Good Friday. But it was the same old cocktail: drugs, guns, Arabs, falcons. Flemingesque vulgarity: ‘Crême brûlée with Château d’Yquem made for a good dessert.’ The karma of cash. ‘It’s always ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”

“... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...”

“... is covered and pierced in many ways, by church steeples, nuclear reactors, safari parks, six-lane highways, ruined monasteries, radio telescopes, wind turbines, landfill sites, golf courses. Mostly, though, it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by ...”

“... make language flow and shine. He comes back, again and again, to a single quotation from the poet David Lunde; one that Griffin, believe it or not, stumbles on while browsing through the racks of Beaucoup Books on Magazine Street: ‘We must learn to put our distress systems into code.’ There it is every time, in every book, the great theme that underlies ...”

“... he ‘never had Protestant neighbours in and out of the house’, never knew ‘cheek-by-jowl, lane-by-field, country-neighbour life’.And yet, when Heaney began to publish poems, ‘I’d gone delving straight away into the sectarian seam’: such a poem as ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ raised ‘a battened-down spirit that wanted to walk ...”

“... early days of Motley. They had taken as a studio Chippendale’s old workshop behind St Martin’s Lane, where a gang of actors, led by Gielgud, could generally be found sitting around, gossiping, discussing productions and having tea. With a tea bill that sometimes came to £100 a week, it sounds cosy, cliquey and not the stuff of theatrical revolution, and ...”

“... and naturally they pretended they hadn’t heard me. Further up Ballygunge Circular Road is the David Hare Training College, named after a 19th-century Scottish watchmaker and fiercely non-evangelical educationist beloved by Bengalis of the time. The place was swarming with convivial-looking policemen. I sat down opposite a man in khaki regalia, with ...”

“... out to be a Spanish chef capable and indeed only too pleased to produce delicious pre-Elizabeth David food for the ravenous Radletts.13 February. ‘God’s honour’ we used to swear as boys. This remembered in the middle of an acute attack of arthritis pain this morning when I’m marooned on the sofa, cold, thirsty but unable to move. ‘I don’t know ...”

“... I’ve worked in, including the Round Reading Room at the old Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. The memoranda rolls on which I spent most of my time were long, thin swatches of parchment about five foot in length and written on both sides. To turn the page required the co-operation and forbearance of most of the other readers at the table, so it would ...”

“... did not long survive her son’s birth, and soon afterwards Ms Woolvine met and married David McCluskie, a plasterer and bricklayer. Terry took McCluskie’s name, though this was never regularised. The family moved to London after the strike at Cammell-Laird, when David McCluskie was finding work hard to come ...”

“... Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood had its premiere at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane on 13 December 1727. It was a romantic tragicomedy in a Spanish setting; the story was from an episode in Don Quixote. Theobald’s statement that it met with ‘universal applause’ is untrue, but it certainly created a buzz ...”