“... pagan are all tolerated. Defoe, who claimed a knowledge of five languages, was educated at Charles Morton’s Dissenting Academy in Newington Green. Morton was a distinguished teacher and educationalist who was incessantly harassed by the Anglican Church till he left England for North America, where he became Vice-President ...”

“... A recent episode in a jobbing writer’s life found me interviewing Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg) in her comprehensively occupied Belsize Park flat. The unreality of this situation – talking, shoulder to shoulder, with one of the Beat Generation’s best-preserved icons – was ameliorated by the fact that our paths had crossed a number of times over the last fifteen years ...”

“... otherwise. This tribalism coloured the writing of the time too. Apostates to modernism such as P. Morton Shand – sometime champion of German cinemas and grandfather of Queen Camilla the First – and J.M. Richards were, so to speak, blackballed by an increasingly polarised architectural press. Decades later Stamp would himself be on the receiving end of the ...”