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“... marker-penned slogans, or doodles, or quotes from Goethe; a sinister ballpoint-pen portrait of David Cameron and cards written by solicitors Birnberg Peirce explaining that you don’t need to give your name if searched. The walls are a sort of slogan competition, in the manner of a JCR suggestion book or a library toilet wall: which ones will last? In the ...”

“... for its innovations and its geniuses and scoff at it for thinking it invented human nature. (David Hume, late of that parish, invented human understanding, or a treatise of that name, and that’s quite different.) Meanwhile, we can love Glasgow for its rebel spirit and its demotic energy while noting the piousness of Bearsden and Milngavie. Scotland ...”

“... Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced Surrealism to England. He helped persuade Picasso (it didn’t take much) to contribute to the 1936 exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in Piccadilly, which launched the movement in Britain. As Penrose tells it, Eluard had taken ...”

“... and that I could expect a visit. My interrogator was in his mid-fifties, tall, well-spoken, and wearing a long dark overcoat which he didn’t take off. He sat down with his laptop and I made him a cup of tea. I don’t remember much else about our encounter, except that his questions seemed to go on for ever and that I was anxious to please. The General ...”

“... posh, adorns the front and back covers of the March issue of British Vogue. On the front, she’s wearing a chiffon crepon dress by Gucci – a semi-see-through affair with cartoon-effect sequined appliqué collar, ruffles, epaulettes and bow. She’s lying on a pink and gold brocade sofa, half-smiling and biting her thumb. On the back she’s advertising ...”

“... cold enough that I won’t enjoy it.’ ‘And you’re going to have a shower wearing your spectacles?’ He took them off and laughed. ‘I put them on to think.’ ‘What were you thinking?’ Without answering, he went into the bathroom. There was a yellowish mucus, which seemed to have a yellowish matter in it, around the orifice of ...”

“... a silent carriage for the journey home; bruises earned fighting off the kind of men who insist on wearing riding boots in bed. The ‘bad’ Bembo cousin, Wilfred, reinvented as Billy Baxter, spurns provincialism and becomes a radio comedian, a personality. A fruit-eater. A roadside sex pest, a killer. Giles Doughty (Binding names with relish, as if he were ...”

“... she compared her parents to a snow-covered rose outside the window: ‘a survivor wearing a cap of snow askew on its bowed head’. ‘It was not a particularly apt metaphor,’ she later conceded, ‘but I was wonderfully proud of it.’ And she should have been. The committee soon found sponsors, visas and jobs for her ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage ...”

“... The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such as Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza (wearing a ‘100+ carat diamond’), Al Taubman and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. De Pury was private curator to Baron ‘Heini’ – Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza – then chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, then established Phillips de Pury, which he ...”

“... be called as a witness in the contemporary American quarrel concerning multiculturalism by both David Suchoff and Judith Friedlander, the translators of (respectively) The Imaginary Jew and The Defeat of the Mind, and be ascribed a different position by each. (Interestingly, the 1988 English translation of The Defeat of the Mind, entitled The Undoing of ...”

“... and his text shows more than a passing resemblance to other, better, secondary sources – David Robertson’s George Mallory, Walt Unsworth’s Everest, Peter Hopkirk’s Trespassers on the Roof of the World, Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel’s Mystery of Mallory & Irvine. By contrast, Last Climb is not only well written, it derives authority from the ...”

“... of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when the last national serviceman was demobbed, draws on memoirs, interviews and official ...”

“... chief solace of his labours’. He saved a lock of her hair, and began to wear the ring she was wearing when she died. He never took it off, ‘by day or by night, except for an instant at a time, to wash my hands, since she died. I have never had her sweetness and excellence absent from my mind so long. I can solemnly say that, waking or sleeping, I have ...”