“... of 15, ‘nymphomaniac’, ‘hyperactive’, ‘coked up to the eyeballs’ and eavesdropped on by Lucie every morning as she stuffs ‘her face with muffins and Coca-Cola’ in the café next door to her expensive school. Only two things mark out Valentine from the other rich, pretty, sad girls in the café by the ...”

“... he drives, which after the latest bout of arthritis in my ankle, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do.7 January, Yorkshire. On the war memorial at Malham is the inscription:Live thou for EnglandWe for England diedI don’t know if this is a quotation, or an injunction that was, as it were, custom-made, but I find it – if only slightly ...”

“... Blondie (1980) and in Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie (1982), an autobiography ghosted by Victor Bockris but written, supposedly, by Harry herself, in collaboration with her guitarist and then lover, Chris Stein.This new memoir is also ghosted, by Sylvie Simmons, and is ...”

“... cane fields and enslaved labour to return home, safe in the expectation that his plantations could be managed from a distance while he enjoyed a life of leisure. He had been keen to return to ‘his dear Native Land’, determined that his children should receive an English education. ‘I can no more be happy here than ...”

“... the tables of Le Catalan, a restaurant on the Left Bank, and was equally underwhelmed. Surrounded by friends and his lover Dora Maar, Picasso was 61 and greying. He possessed a certain magnetism, it was true, but he looked nothing like the ‘handsome animal’ in the Man Ray photographs Gilot had seen in Cahiers d’art: ‘dark hair, bright flashing ...”

“... If you know​ anything about Magnus Carlsen, you probably know that he is supposed to be making chess cool. Before he was twenty, he was the subject of two books and a film; in the years since – he’s now 28 and the world’s best chess player – he has been one of Cosmopolitan’s sexiest men and one of Time’s hundred most influential ...”

“... slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend since the 1950s ...”

“... You need​ to be over seventy now to remember the awful thrill of the announcement: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.’ For the older generation, Princess Margaret was the unlucky princess. She was our Diana: capricious, passionate, vindictive, doomed to fall in love with rotters, the breakaway royal who hung out with actors and rogues and who was frozen out by a cold-hearted court, finding contentment only in her hospital work and her two children ...”

“... the ‘principal reason’ he opened his millinery business ‘was to bring happiness to the world by making women an inspiration to themselves and everyone who saw them’, it may sound like the usual, gendered fashion hyperbole, but I believe him. Those who admired his work as an observer of fashion – and he was much praised in the last years of his life ...”

“... families’, a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About ...”

“... Pampa Michi, once a coffee estate: the collateral damage of a monumental but sanctioned land grab by the Peruvian Corporation of London in the 1890s. Who Michi was nobody is certain: a forgotten manager, an outsider, one of the chori or colonos called Michael? The other surviving settlements in the Perené Colony, Pampa Silva and Pampa Whaley, are also named ...”

“... on the saucy metaphors and sprinkling the demotic seasoning, when he is suddenly interrupted by a briefing from Public Health England or the chief medical officer: there is a nasty virus heading this way from China. So what does Superman do? Far from commissioning plans for an emergency response, he swirls his cape and takes the first available ...”

“... The Black Veil is the latest voyage to the bottom of the sink, a journey of self-discovery jinxed by dense fog and treacherous syntax. Moody is best known for his novels, Garden State (which is being released for the first time in the UK to piggyback on the publication of this book),* Purple America and The Ice Storm, and his short-story collections, The Ring ...”

“... which class children are most likely to misbehave in?’ The answer turned out to be Citizenship. And which subject would best teach children ‘respect for authority and the importance of discipline in school’? History. Not any old history, however, and certainly not the trendy kind that asks them to empathise with particular historical ...”

“... other day that Tony Blair’s government had made both obesity and Aids in this country much worse by doing ‘everything it can to promote buggery’. Aside from anything else, this comment might cause us to reflect (buggerishly) on the England beloved of bigots like Tebbit and to see it as a land not only of warm beer and cricket on the village green, but ...”