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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... glut of sweetmeats provoked a predictable backlash of anti-Petrarchan satire and parody. Among the London types lampooned by Thomas Nashe in Pierce Penniless (1592) is the second-rate sonneteer: ‘All Italianato is his talk … He will be an Inamorato poeta, & sonnet a whole quire of paper in praise of Lady Swinesnout, his yellow-faced mistress.’ In Joseph ...”

“... a little wrinkle in the love triangle involving Bellow, his then wife Sondra, and Sondra’s lover Jack Ludwig, also a member of the Bard English Department. Mustn’t there be, it was suggested, some ‘homosexual component’ – Atlas probably wants to say ‘homosocial’ – in the relationship between the two men? To explain this sort of arrangement, he ...”

“... In London, newsagents, sub-post offices and what used to be called grocers, with the three of them absorbed at times into a single unit, are now run almost exclusively by Asians. The same is true in other parts of Brittain: notably, Leicester, Coventry, Bradford, the West Midlands and some of the North-West. And this is just the most visible aspect of Asian business activity in this country ...”

“... 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 ...”