“... flat into a brothel, Frank grows up spying on prostitutes and their clients through a hole in the wall. But although money, power and self-gratification seem the only values that matter in the world around him, he’s nevertheless fascinated by the wholesome ménage in the flat underneath his own, where a widower, Holst, lives with his 16-year-old ...”

“... his personality has a direct bearing on his success.’ The most substantial biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell ...”

“... beach made me witness to a quite interesting gangbang in which the principal performers were Patrick (and equipage, rather to my surprise) and a German of remarkable handsomeness and Royal physique. I merely held the gloves, as it were, but it was quite interesting en plein air.’ Then it’s on to Spoleto: ‘This place is mad – Festival of Fifty ...”

“... eyes [were] spattering tears.’ Having been assaulted – ‘pinned to the dining room wall’ – and beaten for what he loved and who he was, he goes on to describe his relentless shopping for his sisters as ‘my assault of buying clothes’. The book continues mostly as it began: it is a precise, unrancorous (mostly) record of his nascent ...”

“... the new tourist trade, you can see where Allende once added his signature to those scrawled on the wall. ‘Cuba Libre,’ it says. ‘Chile espera.’ That was on 28 June 1961. The inscription possesses an almost antique quality these days, like a graffito from a revolutionary Pompeii. Allende, in other words, was Old Left: a dedicated physician, an ...”

“... he was, on and off, to own nine, one of which he referred to as ‘The Buggers’ and hung on the wall opposite his bed. He enjoyed Bacon’s company, but, more important, he paid attention to what Bacon had to say about paint: He talked a great deal about the paint itself carrying the form, and imbuing the paint with this sort of life; he talked about ...”

“... and silk scarf, with immaculate cufflinks glinting, is reclining, travel guide in hand, on an old wall, in a parched and sunlit southern landscape, amid sandy ancient ruins. His book is appealingly personal, and if it represents a great gathering of knowledge, it also feels like something that had to be pushed out, got rid of, confessed. I found myself ...”

“... raised. Even more charitable grinding has taken place just before on behalf of a living writer, Patrick White (the contradictory demands of national and international literary histories put many cabbages out of the chronological straight line). Where Beckett, whose prose fiction deserves more consideration, gets nine lines, and Chandler only dates of birth ...”

“... the attention, an obsession with fashion detail the like of which we haven’t seen since Patrick Bateman was looking out his tie in American Psycho, and, then, of course, there’s the friends. Lulu has more than your average head for vertiginous name-dropping: it’s Elton this and John Lennon that, insecurity all the way, but this doesn’t stop ...”

“... them. The IRA was active in the complex. The first child killed in the conflict, nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, died in his family’s flat there in August 1969, after the army fired a Browning machine gun at the block during a gun battle. There was an army post on top of the tower and an army barracks just up the road in the old mill at Albert Street. Soon ...”

“... returned. He came back to England. Just in time for Margaret Thatcher. The cultural historian Patrick Wright, a man with a secret fondness for poetry (holograph Louis Zukofsky on the wall), made the trip at the same time, decanted from Vancouver. Those hazy overseas slots were vanishing and England was going mad. ‘I ...”

“... of St Bridget’s Confraternity in the early 1880s, led by Father Sheridan, a priest at St Patrick’s in Soho, mainly comprised humorous readings, with rosaries the only brief nod to observance. In his register, Sheridan constantly congratulated himself on the uproarious laughter he provoked. Priests had a relationship not only with the devout but ...”

“... one social – among these private housing projects. No. 10 Blackheath Park, designed by Patrick Gwynne, is an outré, glamorous house, with a fetishistic black slate and black-tinted glass exterior, an imposing symmetrical plan and ostentatiously synthetic materials within – the walls are lined with ‘plastic cloth’, a material, as Francisco ...”

“... is anything but. Pamela Harriman gives a welcome-to-Washington party in Georgetown, which features wall-to-wall lobbyists and power-brokers of the most traditional stripe. Campaign contributors are received and rewarded in proportion to the timeliness, and the size, of their subscriptions. The first harvest of cabinet ...”

“... and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy Brandt at the Ghetto memorial. Whether ‘the ultimate reality must be anarchy’ who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is kindred’: perhaps that is true; perhaps a great cross-roaded mind has blundered: ‘nadir ...”