“... the stage, a Pomeranian, and another, a Pekingese, and myself. We also had a parlourmaid who was black, which was a rarity in those days, and she was called – to her face, I believe – ‘Black Mary’. It was not till some two or three years after we moved that my father found it necessary to have a chauffeur, and then ...”

“... waylay him, but succeeded only once, in November 1935. Clutching their dog Polly and wearing the black shirt of the British Union of Fascists – which she may have joined to please her husband, who had on one occasion expressed some admiration for Mussolini – she managed to get close enough to him after one of his public lectures to ask when he would be ...”

“... castle in such a workaday place, where the clamour of the shipyards reached into every street and black smoke plumed from the trains that bustled to and from Glasgow. But there, squashed between two shipyards, almost as if it had been built after them, stood Newark Castle. Port Glaswegians felt the castle conferred romantic credentials on a place sometimes ...”