“... on and interprets, as well as mapping the historical geography of the poem: its antipathy to the North, associated with Charles raising his standard at Nottingham, with Scotland and with Strafford’s Yorkshire. Satan’s association with ‘glistering spires’ implies Royalist Oxford, and Pandemonium is the Divinity School in the Bodleian Library, where ...”

“... spy, I wanted my character to have a legend that was so copper-bottomed, so strong and sure, like Oliver Twist’s, say, or Humbert Humbert’s, or mine, that it wouldn’t just fool the public but very nearly fool its author. I looked at old photographs from this school, and from the secondary school I placed him at, St Aloysius College in Highgate, and ...”

“... fever and dysentery.’The potato crop failed again in 1848, this time mainly in the west and the north-east. In London, in an early instance of effective spin-doctoring, there was a move to insist that the Famine was over, and that any remaining problems could be handled locally. ‘What shocks,’ O Grada writes in The Great Irish Famine, ‘is the size of ...”

“... impulsive tics and Korsakoff’s (Sergei, that is) amnesia, both recently made famous again by Oliver Sacks; Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, just to bring us right up to the mad cow. (No woman – at least at this level – seems to have had anything named after her.) A name announces only the dénouement, however: it does not convey the extraordinary ...”

“... and Willesden Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders Green, otherwise known as Goldberg Green or the Polish Corridor. We were to live in Teignmouth Road till 1940, so it is ...”

“... right.31 May. A late birthday present, a mug dated January 1889, commemorates the gift by Colonel North of the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey to the then borough of Leeds. There is a picture of Kirkstall and the inscription: ‘Built in 1147. Destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in 1539.’ This was what most people believed in Leeds ...”

“... and a postmortem arranged.Nine hours earlier, Merope and I had been in the ambulance that sped north through the city to GOSH. I held Martha’s head in my hands; her eyes were taped shut, her body was swollen and discoloured. Now we took a taxi back to King’s to pick up possessions from her cubicle on Rays of Sunshine ward – presents she’d been ...”