“... correspondence and results, there was a knock at the door – Pearl again. ‘I’m really sorry Gavin, there’s another visit. Ellen MacIvor’s carer has phoned, says she’s confused.’ I knew Ellen MacIvor a little better than Mary Robertson. She was 95 years old – born in 1922 – and somehow was still managing to live alone on the second floor of ...”

“... of his own, Gente en la Playa, going to the beach on Sundays to record, in neo-realist fashion, a young film-maker’s impressions. (He doesn’t mention whether or not he had seen Emmer’s famous 1950 feature Domenica d’Agosto.) His activity began to annoy: using the simple materials to hand, particularly available light only, the ...”

“... at UCL found that, between 2000 and 2018, there was a twenty-fold increase in ADHD diagnoses among young men and a near fifty-fold increase in prescriptions. There are a wealth of generic suppliers of most cardiac or diabetic medications, but only a limited number of manufacturers of ADHD drugs, which means that a hiccup in a single company’s supply chain ...”

“... other good poems he likes that could truthfully be said to do more than mention localities. Gavin Ewart is a very good and very readable writer of verse which, if not ‘light’, is not heavy either. If, therefore, his Penguin Book of Light Verse is less wholly pleasurable, even less admirable, than Geoffrey Grigson’s now nearly ten-years-old but ...”

“... men involved, who are now dead (I am about to do so), but the man described in my book as the ‘young planter’ is still alive, and I will not name him. Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they got off a ...”

“... in 1896 and won by the Glasgow firm of Honeyman & Keppie. The drawings were made by a brilliant young assistant, a policeman’s son from Dennistoun who was born Charles R. McIntosh, but he was not at first given any credit for the design. The plan is admirably clear, with tall north-facing studios placed along spinal corridors. The huge windows that light ...”

“... is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing mother to stay in his flat in Swiss Cottage. Before she arrives he cleans up the ...”

“... perforate – A case of jactitation.    Being discovered In flagrante delicto    With a young person In statu pupillari He pleads hypnopaedia.    Dreaming you’re starving Lost in a forest: millefeuilles    Drift down to your mouth.    Sucking at jujubes (Junketing, jabberwocky!)    Sipping mint juleps.    It still disturbs him The ...”

“... have mixed these types of inquiry, with varying objectives and varying degrees of success. As Gavin Drewry, the editor of The New Select Committees, points out in his introduction, ‘the purpose of a report may be to influence a government department, or another public sector agency, or to provide information for MPs to use in a forthcoming Parliamentary ...”

“... 13 January. Having supper in the National Theatre restaurant are Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. ‘I suppose you like this place,’ says Lindsay. I do, actually, as the food is now very good. I say so and Lindsay, who judges all restaurants by the standard of the Cosmo in Finchley Road, smiles wearily, pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline ...”

“... and facial contours provide a lot of information about ethnicity. She writes about a decomposed young woman bound in tape and folded into a suitcase, who she could confidently say was of East Asian origin: ‘Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, Japan or China. I didn’t think she had the facial characteristics that would take her south into Malaysia or ...”

“... my patients once fell twenty feet from it. Gary Hobbes wasn’t normally a tree-climber: he was a young man with schizophrenia who, after taking a cocktail of MDMA, became convinced he had transformed into a cat. Witnesses recounted that on the day of his fall he had been prowling the local streets examining the contents of bins, before scaling the elm to ...”

“... of life, and standards of civilised behaviour’. In a remote part of Abyssinia in 1933 he met a young Danakil tribesman who had just killed three men: ‘He looked about eighteen, with a ready, friendly smile and considerable charm . . . He struck me as the Danakil equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for ...”

“... distracted. Frail elderly people often have a less robust systemic response to infection than the young and fit, but even so, Mr Wedderburn was flushed with a temperature of 38°C, and was breathing much too quickly. As I listened to his lungs with my stethoscope his fingers picked at the bedcovers, and his feet knocked against his cot-bars. When I took a ...”

“... that enigma with its own blare and kerfuffle. Eventually, ‘Morris’ gets married and has a son, Gavin. Morris fils grows up to be a left-wing political activist deeply committed to the New Left and deeply hostile to the fascist bastards who run things – guys like, you know, the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. With much the same sense of effortful ...”