“... in 1945). As Bridget and I unlatched the gate and went in, the sun came out – just like in a Jane Austen novel when the heroine is about to get proposed to. We walked around; we scrutinised the inscription on the Blomfield Cross of Sacrifice. We read the homely greeting-card messages in the memorial book. (‘Sleep well, lads!’ ‘We’ll never forget ...”

“... Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel. Isherwood, who was in the ...”

“... they are a white, cis, straight bourgeois male – any more than because they are a queer, brown, female metropolitan elite. (Indeed, one way of putting the core insight of psychoanalysis is that none of us is simply any of the categories under which we fall, no matter how much we may consciously identify with it.) But in its basic imperative to read ...”

“... she had bought the occasional tray cloth or hank of Sylko but, on a much more regular basis, plain brown paper packets of what in those days were called ‘towels’. The closing-down of the shop in the late Sixties had left Mrs Ransome anxious and unprotected and it came as a genuine surprise on venturing into Timothy White’s to find that technology in this ...”