“... in art.One day​ he set out on a walk from the town (he was a good walker), made his way up the hill and along the Poole Road and eventually arrived at the villa at 63 Alum Chine Road, where he rang the bell. Valentine Roch, the Stevensons’ servant, mistook him for a carpet dealer who had let them down. First she kept him in the vestibule, then sent him ...”

“... Liberal Party and then high commissioner to the UK. In June, Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort held a secret meeting with Russians at Trump Tower. In July, after the hacking of the Democratic National Committee was widely reported, Downer informed American intelligence about his conversation with Papadopoulos. The FBI investigated and found ...”

“... his paedophilic housemaster. If Williams’s notion does not take sufficient account of the Paul Foots of this world, it also fails to take account of the army of ex-working-class socialists who are not averse to swapping their political beliefs for a Jacobean farmhouse in Kent. Orwell did not get a bullet through his throat in Spain because he was ...”

“... me awake, and no one was sorry;The sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles, anything,And the high green hill sits always by the sea.‘No one was sorry’ admits to a world in which people might be, but doesn’t concede to it. With its transvaluation of everything via that ‘anything’, and its blissed-out drift from recollected past into incantatory ...”

“... there’s a man there, handsome and strong and much younger. He’s a neighbour from down the hill. Vial is much younger than Colette, and a Colette fan, a Colette groupie, even. He’s hoping to have an affair with this beautiful, beloved writer, and all that happens in the novel is that Colette considers whether to take him up. ‘Is suffering so very ...”

“... as if it has been shouldered to the very edge of the plateau and is about to slither down Marston Hill into the valley.So: to the north the barbed-wire perimeter fence of the airfield; to the south the steep slope of the valley ending in the brickworks. There was nowhere to walk to any more. If now you want to wander around, you are forced to parade up the ...”

“... I always felt kindly towards him after learning that he would not stay in the same room as Paul Johnson. 15 March. There is generally a beggar sitting outside the back door of M&S (and likely to be one at the front as well). I will sometimes give them my change as I’m coming out, though I’m irritated at being asked for money as I’m padlocking my ...”

“... is born of a century or more of American exceptionalism, of the belief in America as the city on a hill to which all yearn to travel, the superpower whose fin-de-siècle worries that its imperial powers were atrophying as those of other empires had done (see Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) were ...”

“... goods, but its story of rocketing success and abrupt implosion began elsewhere: in pornography. Paul Bauer was a Munich-based skatewear entrepreneur – he had the Central European rights to Vans, the US sneaker brand – who in 1997 got chatting to a man he met on a plane and ended up, as you do, flying to Los Angeles to negotiate with Larry Flynt for the ...”

“... the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help enjoying the ...”

“... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the Royal ...”

“... mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the street, and the woman made an offer well above the market rate. ‘Frederick had just ...”

“... have any gravy? Did Scipio’s legions, deep in the burning African waste, have gravy? Did Fanny Hill?’ ‘Did Fanny Hill what?’ I asked ‘Never mind, you cad,’ he threw at me. ‘I’m sick to death of innuendo, brittle small talk, the sly, silken rustle of feminine underthings. I want to sit in a ball park ...”

“... for giving support to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (‘Rotovating a few beds of nettles up the hill at the cottage in Craswell wasn’t what the Red Guards had in mind’); for fathering an impossibilist and utopian politics (in the May Day Manifesto movement of 1967); and, as a student journalist, for supporting the Russians in the Finnish war of 1940. If ...”

“... a malignant chain reaction. By 14 July, transport was moving, the Number 30 bus trundled up the hill from King’s Cross as I walked down, once again, to the station. There were more pedestrians, certainly, more rucksacks, but bus passengers were as stoic, preoccupied, chemically adapted as ever. They looked forward, impatiently, to the forthcoming Harry ...”