“... where to place himself. ‘That’ll do,’ said Seamus, laughing into the circus. ‘Top marks.’ After a moment, Karl looked up, quoting from Tam o’ Shanter. ‘Weel done, cutty sark,’ he said. As we walked up to our rooms Karl stopped in the corridor and looked at us. ‘Do I suddenly seem very old and doddery to you?’‘Not at ...”

“... hardly cosy is consoling, too, both of us happiest reading what we know already. 11 October. Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the MS of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in ...”

“... Foot, Tom Hopkinson (of Picture Post), Tom Harrisson (of Mass Observation), Alastair Forbes and Stephen King-Hall, some of whom became Observer contributors when Astor took charge. But that was years away. In the meantime he started to work for Louis Mountbatten in Combined Operations during the week and for the family newspaper in the evenings and at ...”

“... Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National Library. I studied in the National Library almost every weekday between 1973 and 1975, and it is easier to wonder who stole my yellow ...”

“... trying to make you feel small but he ended up making you feel big.Absolutely. When I got fewer red marks than these other guys, the footballers, I began to think I was getting somewhere. This teacher – call him ‘P.J.’ – rarely praised anybody. Or if he did, he praised them at someone else’s expense. So there was a very unpleasant atmosphere in his ...”

“... touch of the great performer looking down kindly from the heights of his own virtuosity and giving marks for effort. Opinions differ about the passage on Beethoven in Howards End, commended so warmly by Britten. There is easy fun at the expense of Tibby, fussing about the transitional passage on the drum, and the joking about other false or strained attitudes ...”

“... Khadija Khalloufi in Flat 143 on the 17th floor. She was 52 and worked all the hours she could at Marks & Spencer on Edgware Road. She missed her family all day every day: they lived in Mohammedia in Morocco and she told friends it was sometimes difficult to stick with the life she’d made in England. ‘Khadija was the eldest child,’ her brother Karim ...”