“... occasion, I tried 42 versions, but the final effect was too lapidary – you know what I mean, Jack? What the hell are you trying to extort – my trade secrets?’ As everyone knows, being a funny man is no laughing matter: our most popular clowns seem almost expected to have a savage, twisted underside to their natures. Perelman, who lived entirely off ...”

“... imagine concretely – that one could then quite unremarkably drive from door to door in Central London and park one’s car outside one’s club. This is the world in which Sassoon is moving around in the years recorded in this third volume of the diaries. Although at the beginning he is riding in the Cotswold Open Race in which, as he says with heavy ...”

“... fleuve gives a much truer picture of varieties of behaviour in the monde of the time, in Oxford, London or the country. Pansy Lamb, Powell’s sister-in-law, who liked Waugh, ventured to point out to him that the upper classes were not a bit like that really. But the ‘Brideshead Generation’ is how the reader wants them to be, and like all fantasies ...”

“... was as a political fait accompli. In the not so distant past this was the method used by Jack Straw, as foreign and Commonwealth secretary, to deprive the Chagos islanders of their right to return. It is no way to run a democracy, and it is to be hoped that in less febrile times the entire prerogative procedure will be made public. More dramatic than ...”

“... dedicated drunks still sing in the marketplace, and out the back there’s an old guy who knew Jack Kerouac. Spring in January now, of course: no doubt the daffs and daisies are already out and you lot, in the serene post-Christmas lull, biking the back roads between Hob and Schull. Here at the heure bleue in the Deux Magots where as a student I couldn’t ...”

“... Britain, gave rise to one of the greatest portraits of her, taken by the film’s cinematographer Jack Cardiff, capturing her as a blurred, diaphanous heroine out of Renoir. When you see it here, you think: she painted this.I have an autograph of Marilyn and Arthur Miller. They signed it to somebody outside a theatre, I guess, perhaps on that trip to ...”

“... my first few years out here. Father liked the idea of the place. As a boy he’d been mad for Jack London and that author’s many youthful adventures here by the Bay. Mother hated it. Also, it upset her to be more than ten miles (or beyond toll-free telephone range) from her two sisters and Nanny Farbisseneh, who was now so old and so small that it ...”

“... of many genres and pseudonyms (Alexis K. Triffel, Virginia Lindisfarne, Jay C. Dacey), leaves her London life with its perpetual diets, its writing ‘squeezed in’ between domestic errands and maternal obligations, its dual enemies of ‘sleep and food’, to stay for a few weeks in the house of her friend Angèle’s mother in South-West France. Here she ...”

“... present-tense cascade of details captures this all too viscerally. Here (if you can stomach it) is Jack Owen Spillman III, the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane, who, after killing Rita Huffman and her daughter Mandy, ‘strips and eviscerates both women. He rapes Mandy, jamming the baseball bat into her vaginal cavity; he places genital skin across her face. He ...”

“... housing? (Riddoch herself believes in the power of small co-operatives.) Nobody supposes that a London government could tackle such work, or would want to. Some think that Salmond’s devolved Scottish government could make huge changes right now, without independence, if the will to confront established power were there. A man in Livingston said to ...”

“... glimmers. The ‘intimate flux’ of Lou Kline’s thoughts on the morning of his trip to London with his daughter Roxy – Charlie’s half-sister; Kline was one of the men in the forest – is a comic assemblage of mundanities, distant sensory impressions, emotions and drives. We encounter his stream of consciousness from an older Roxy’s ...”

“... two dozen of them sailed every day except Sunday to previously hard to reach corners of the firth. London had its first sight of a steamboat when a Clyde-built ship (the Margery, launched in Dumbarton) arrived on the Thames in 1815; the next year it became the first to cross the English Channel and the first to be seen in Paris, where an excited crowd watched ...”

“... inspired leadership, such as that of the elder Pitt, of superior fighting skills, such as those of Jack Tar, and of tactical brilliance, such as that of Marlborough, Wellington and Nelson. This reluctance to institutionalise war also helps explain why so little has been written on the domestic impact of Britain’s involvement in international ...”

“... and for once had not cooked any of it. Then she bought a plastic policeman’s hat and a Union Jack flag on a stick and had a picture taken in front of Big Ben for 50p. When she arrived home at 7 p.m. the police were waiting, called by her panicked eldest daughter. They suspected Emecheta had been at a boyfriend’s house and questioned the absconding ...”

“... much like being shipwrecked on the Tempest island of the Elephant and Castle; another chunk of London real estate serially overwhelmed by enlightened development. Reaching the end of my biblical allocation of years brought on something more troubling than Nick Cave’s midlife mirror interrogation, his 20,000 Days on Earth. Hurtling to oblivion around the ...”