“... Beginner, published in 1966, about living in Cairo as a child between the wars: her father, Sir William Goodenough Hayter, was a judge with the Anglo-Egyptian Service, a vital arm of the British Protectorate running the country from the wings. There were many prints of Egypt in our Zamalek flat – picturesque views of the ruins and the pyramids and Old ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”

“... can be both, you know) of Coleridge and Keats and Byron, but he seems to be particularly fond of William Blake, a poet I find crude and clumsy. Poetically Blake is as naive as he is primitive as a draughtsman: an illustrator of Biblical themes who entertains metaphysical pretensions above his station of the cross. ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright’ – this ...”

“... Chicago Cubs, playing out of beautiful, haunted Wrigley Field. In 1945 a local tavern owner called William Sianis was refused entry to a World Series game at Wrigley because he wanted to bring his goat with him (according to legend, the goat ‘smelt’, though this door policy has not always been consistently applied at baseball stadiums). Sianis chose to ...”

“... more distinguished old boys.That was in 1991. Since then, Icke has worked on his material and his brand, developing his following, writing books, and giving lectures and interviews around the world. Last year he was banned from entering Australia but in 2018 he was still welcomed by large audiences in municipal venues in English towns, where his fans sat ...”

“... Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school itself will shortly get a new name too; the most recent monitoring visit from Ofsted showed definite progress. But schools know they are in ...”

“... recall: the way she forces her to funnel ‘a bottle of Jim’s vodka, the cheapest brand available on the island, into the empty Smirnoff bottle in the living-room’; her floridly racist vocabulary (‘she was always saying Chink and Jap and nigger, which in Pentimento she claimed she would never say’); her cheating at Scrabble (during games ...”

“... pizza on a Friday night. He praised industrial vegetable oils yet had never tasted Nutella.In 1914 William Lever decided to diversify his palm oil empire. Margarine, he thought, had the potential to be a much bigger market than soap, because consumers would always be willing to spend more on feeding themselves than on washing. In the 1880s, Lever and his ...”

“... England turns out to be an old curiosity shop disintegrating among the gleaming hangars of a brand new retail park. McKie is the grizzled proprietor, momentarily bringing past and present together to produce ironical effects, and smiling as he lets them spring apart again. Despite his tactical disavowal of earnestness, McKie knows his Defoe, Cobbett and ...”

“... nude in bright light, with the red-shirted painter seen in a mirror – it looks oddly like one of William Orpen’s sunlight-in-the-studio pictures. In 1904 there was an exhibition at Vollard’s. Vollard and Matisse were about the same age and, as Spurling puts it, ‘both great gamblers’, although ‘neither could give the other the secure base each had ...”

“... attraction, should, in his case, regularly end it by destroying it. Soon, he was working his own brand of Southern Gothic: ‘Now there are a great many dogs in this town, rat terriers, bird dogs, bloodhounds; they trail along the forlorn noon-hot streets in sleepy herds of six to a dozen, all waiting only for dark and the moon, when straight through the ...”

“... was over the name. I favoured (homage to Izaak Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double e, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of ...”

“... incidents like this punctuated my afternoons. I was working at the City Academy in Hackney, a brand-new comprehensive built to replace Homerton House Boys’ School, which had become notorious for ill-discipline and gang activity. Rather than try to reform what was there, the idea was to knock the whole thing down and start again, using central government ...”

“... of the ancients. Strauss’s views or versions of them were alive and well in the persons of William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Chester Finn, Dianne Ravitch and Quayle chief of staff William Kristol, and it is at least arguable that these and others close to the Administration were able to influence its ...”

“... and certain others are intended not to know. Information doesn’t want to be free – as Stewart Brand put it in the 1980s – but it does often require a lot of effort to select the things to keep close, to guard and administer them, and, eventually, to thin out the stock of secrets and let some of them loose. Stores of secrets are supposed to be ...”