“... the literary silence? Disco Biscuits is unlikely to make many converts. The writing is at its best when, as in Gavin Hills’s ‘White Burger Danny’, it restricts itself to a near-documentary account of parties and people. E culture’s variety is well represented, and Martin Millar’s squatland South London, Alex Garland’s backpacker ...”

“... the first page establishes the milieu. ‘Had tea with dear Lady Throckmorton whose nephew Nicholas Throckmorton, Robert’s heir, called.’ Midi Gascoigne and Timmie Buxton, her sister, get a mention, as do Emerald Cunard and Denis Rickett. Logan Pearsall Smith, aged 80, starts to tell a story of an American cousin of Henry James who ‘invited the ...”

“... this fearful symmetry. At one extreme it has triggered the tricksy pretension of the Terry Johnson-Nicholas Roeg film Insignificance; at the other, it inspired Norman Mailer’s ‘novel biography’ of a ‘possible’ Marilyn, which proved a triumph of intuitive speculation. Mailer leaned heavily on the first edition of Fred Lawrence Guiles’s ...”

“... dash and novelty, but little more analysis, in the treatment accorded P.D. James, Peter Lovesey, Nicholas Freeling, Simenon, Chandler and the husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Only one of the essays seems really ambitious, and the effect, I’m afraid, is comic. Eric Mottram – an otherwise much respected old friend of mine – gets ...”

“... every arms company was involved in some kind of covert dealings.’ But, he adds in the best Monday Club tradition, ‘the overriding release had always been that I was very happy that we were making money.’ The boys in the big time were encouraging him to enlarge Astra, re-tool his already spanking plant at Faldingworth, Lincs, and join them on ...”

“... Brave New World so as to learn how things might work out if we did not read Brave New World. And Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea (a best-seller) was held up for massive ridicule: we asked if we could take this item home with us so that we might the more thoroughly acquaint ourselves with its gross failures of ...”

“... one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The term, however, remains a well-understood code in the party for a ...”

“... of 1998, in which Braudel turns his gaze back into antiquity, as well as to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s meditation on the ‘connectivity’ afforded by the Mediterranean, The Corrupting Sea, which appeared in 2000. There is magic in Braudel’s writing and in his ability to cut through historical material to reveal the underlying structure of ...”

“... draws on extensive conversations with jewellers and miners, and he interviewed cooks about the best ways to prepare broths from animal fat or to curdle milk to produce different kinds of cheese. Noting that people get hungrier in cold places than in warm, he remarks with some hyperbole that ‘one Pole or German eats more in a single day than a Lombard or ...”

“... over the traces. (That happens in history.) Or does this make me a ‘conspiracy theorist’ too? Best, I think, to dump the phrase, certainly when it’s used as loosely as this. It doesn’t help. It may however be thought to help MI5. Restoring or boosting its reputation was the main reason this book was commissioned. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the ...”

“... and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film scripts, variously hacked about and supplemented by other hands, including the screenplay for the Bond movie You Only Live Twice. The marriage to Neal had become more ...”

“... As a comment about the fear of brutality this is almost as stupid as Auden’s aphorism (‘The best reason I have for opposing Fascism,’ he wrote in an essay published in 1934, ‘is that at school I lived in a Fascist state’), but without the saving grace of having been made before the full facts of Nazism were known. To write about public school ...”

“... completes his portrait of Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel, Lord Henry Wotton says: ‘It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done. You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. The Grosvenor is really the only place.’ Constance Lloyd’s grandmother and ...”

“... Gerald Percy, a direct descendant of Hotspur (he had a free house too); the former MI5 officer Nicholas Elliott, whose finest hour in the British secret service was to denounce Kim Philby in time for the spy to run to Moscow; and Paul Spicer, Rowland’s devoted bagman, who is well known to every journalist who ever asked a question about Lonrho and had it ...”

“... to rule. The failure of the 1905 Revolution did not gain tsarism much time, and in any case Nicholas II sabotaged his most capable minister, Stolypin; and even his reforms, in Figes’s view, were not ‘capable of stabilising Russia’s social system after the crisis of 1905’. By 1912, urban Russia, he argues (following Leo Haimson’s pioneering ...”