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“... mood of Britain more generally – but I look back on that time fondly. A bright winter’s day, the journey south across the Thames on the top deck of a number 4 bus, the walk along Lower Marsh towards the great naval guns at the museum’s entrance. The afternoon would be darkening on our way back and fairy lights would light the little trains in Ian ...”

“... Danish immigrant forebears feature in her fiction, but fog had closed the airport. With only a day left he rang me, his attention drawn by the fact that I had a Swedish grandfather and that one of my novels, The Death of the Body, had just been published in a Swedish translation. Such travellers always want one to sum up New Zealand – something as ...”

“... escape its mixed condition of moneybarrel and dream, land of locusts and last tycoons. ‘One day one leaf falls in a damn canyon up there,’ Faulkner growled, ‘and they tell you it’s winter.’ The figure we are looking at, as it happens, is Faulkner, photographed at the Highland Hotel, Hollywood, in 1944. It would help if he was writing The Big ...”

“... with her publisher, Lord Longford, to straighten out her biography of the Shah. Rather late in the day Lord Weidenfeld suggests that Lord Chalfont take three years off to do a biography of Ashraf! And this after an earlier proposal by Weidenfeld for ‘a kind of Star over China that would put his [the Shah’s] point of view across as Snow’s book had done ...”

“... insight she has been moved to study: ‘now with that scholarship, hindsight and, of course, my day-to-day witnessing of events as they happened . . . I feel able, at last, to tell the whole truth.’ It must also be disturbing to have reached such a stage of maturity and have to confront the fact that for forty years ...”

“... of postmodernism: Predock would erect a fortification of rammed earth, to be built by Mexican day labourers. There would also be a vast hotplate: the shimmering air above the plate would create a mirage effect, making the earthwork appear to lift off the ground; but the hotplate would also act as a deterrent, scorching the feet of unauthorised ...”

“... Mouth of the South, as the very unrestrained Mitchell was known, saw palls of smoke rising each day from the centre of Washington. ‘Air pollution around here is perfectly terrible,’ she told Woodward in December 1971. ‘My husband sat here and saw this and said, “You get on the phone and do something about it”’ – advice John Mitchell probably ...”

“... institution ‘quite unlike Westminster’, a gathering ‘by interested parties to discuss the day’s work and any other issues that needed to be talked over’: On either side of a rock-paved lane, Two files of men are standing barefooted, Bearded, waistcoated, each with a tam-o’-shanter On his head, and most with a set half-smile That comes from ...”

“... Trelawney went to live at Usk in Wales with his new wife Augusta, where he would sit all day in a lake reading a book. In 1833 he visited Niagara, where he swam the river below the falls, swimming, so he says, ‘without much difficulty’ through the notorious whirlpool in which the Channel swimmer Matthew Webb was to drown nearly fifty years ...”

“... even the queasy glamour of the truly untouchable. It’s not ‘matter out of place’, as Mary Douglas said of dirt, but matter temporarily out of place, or sort-of-in-place, or might-one-day-be-back-in-place. Public trust in the recycling industry is low, dented by years of scandals over illegal dumping and mass ...”

“... the scribbling classes, from obscure editors of Georgian journals to the wranglings of the modern-day Arts Council. Much of this is fascinating stuff. Taylor can tell you how much Cyril Connolly was paid for a weekly newspaper article in the 1960s, or for how much Anthony Burgess sold the film rights of A Clockwork Orange. The book is crammed with intriguing ...”

“... have had me before now, but … before he can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ ‘Some day,’ retorts the bespectacled boatswain Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the dastardly Hook. Ted Hughes makes use of the story in his poem ‘Tick Tock Tick Tock’, from Remains of Elmet ...”

“... skilful and more explosive. It was an innovation wrought by the best professional bowlers of the day and it was against the laws. Despite a rearguard fight by the anti-professional traditionalists, the MCC, the premier club, recognising as always that some accommodation with the realities of the marketplace was essential if it was to preserve its ancient ...”

“... fortifying figures they looked, one remembers, on the eagerly collected cigarette cards of the day: keen-eyed, accipitrine thoroughbreds fated in later years to be played as the boobies of a ‘lovely war’ by a whole cluster of theatrical knights. After the Somme the War Cabinet had little enthusiasm for a repeat match. Lloyd George favoured sending ...”

“... Much later, dining with pop stars in Cheyne Walk, Lady Diana Cooper would mention that, in her day, post-prandial cocaine was served in salt-cellars. Hoare’s wartime London is a stage across which a troupe of affluent, cosmopolitan hipsters parade their unorthodoxy: the artist, drug addict, bisexual and sometime boxer Alvaro ‘Chile’ Guevara; Reginald ...”