“... expecting it to be, well, she wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t what it was. ‘Oh. Cecil Beaton. Did you know him?’ ‘No, maam.’ ‘No, of course not. You’d be too young. He always used to be round here, snapping away. And a bit of a tartar. Stand here, stand there. Snap, snap. So there’s a book about him ...”

“... feeling were threatened by crazy prophets who were acquiring disastrously wide influence – by Robert Knox, the anatomist who published in 1850 a book. The Races of Man, which identified black people as natural slaves, and by Thomas Carlyle, whose ravings about ‘the Nigger Question’ came out around the same time. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, as presented ...”

“... the Sun in 1969, after he’d bought the News of the World from the Carr organisation, defeating Robert Maxwell en route. The News of the World is a Sunday paper, so it was a point of elementary commercial logic to start a daily paper to accompany it, in order that the presses would not lie idle during the week. Larry Lamb, the Sun’s first ...”

“... the biography was commissioned, is depicted as saintly, which perhaps he was. Another ex, Robert Tracy, who proved difficult to dislodge from Nureyev’s apartment in the Dakota Building and has some unwelcome things to say about Nureyev and safe sex, gets it gratuitously and vicariously in the teeth: ‘that shit-boy’, a quote that looks like ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

“... collaborators (which Camus supported) and the execution of fascist sympathisers such as the writer Robert Brasillach (which he opposed). With the start of the Cold War, the always precarious alliance between the communist and non-communist left was beginning to crumble. Camus was fretting, too, about his native Algeria, ‘pacified’ by the army after a ...”