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“... loathsome to her) reptiles. Melanie was the youngest of four children, of whom two were to die young, the third child Sidonie of scrofula at the age of eight and her adored brother Emmanuel at the age of 25, of heart failure brought about by tuberculosis and drug addiction. Emmanuel appears to have fantasised for some time about such an early ...”

“... His heat and his motion. His grin and his shimmy. His robes and his finery. One side of the young Elvis was a faultlessly polite, radiantly ordinary boy next door. But he was also drawn to outrageous clothes, pimpish overload, endless resculpting of his princely hair. His everyday clothes look neither work-appropriate, nor what was then officially ...”

“... brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge dog, Gozo, so fierce that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its socket and eaten it); Robert Crabbe had lost several toes, which I did not think too serious until he ...”

“... Lewis, Ford Madox Ford and, during a brief period when she moved on the fringes of Bloomsbury, Roger Fry. Butts registers their comments, advice and obiter dicta. (Plans have now been announced for a published edition of the diaries, the most important unpublished memoir of the period that I have seen.) In 1918 Butts noted: ‘What we want is a new way of ...”

“... and, when called for, abrupt’): everything – the seed of whatever I try – comes from Karel. Roger Spottiswoode (film editor and director): Some thirty years ago I found myself locked in a London cutting-room with him for several months as we edited The Gambler. One day, he took a phone call from Los Angeles. It was unusually long and when he finally ...”

“... with such inscriptions as ‘Babies’ and ‘Children’. Last week Queen Mary was here, and young Mr Blunt, who is on our staff, was presented to her, as his aunt happens to be the chief official of the Needlework Guild. By this time the idea of incorporating the institute into the University of London had been raised, and in July 1939, after the last ...”

“... Certainly, I was embarrassed and tied in knots by the corniness of the whole performance. Roger didn’t mind, he always enjoyed me disconcerting his parents. By the time of my second marriage, well into my dog days, I had enough confidence to ask the registrar who was to perform the ceremony if I could just say ‘Yes’ when it got to the bit where ...”

“... the literary marketplace do so. His father’s adult life, too, had been a hunt for preferment. Roger Sterne, an army ensign, failed to achieve promotion until a few months before his death. After dragging his family around Ireland with his regiment, he sent the ten-year-old Laurence to be looked after by his brother’s family near Halifax. He died of ...”

“... that the lines were intended for an unfinished play or written as a lyric to Fanny Brawne, the young woman who did not take Keats’s hand in marriage because of his dismal prospects. Yet even if the fragment has Fanny in view as ‘thou’, ‘thine heart’ and so on, we cannot escape its address. When Keats writes ‘– see, here it is/I hold it ...”

“... should remember the bronze virility’ of Arno Breker’s statues, ‘the browned bodies of young workers’ and ‘the guards mounting watch over the memorial of Nazi martyrdom at Munich’, and reclaim ‘what was positive within the Nazi movement’. Hitler, Knight went on, was a ‘burning positive’ who ‘may have been absolutely needed for ...”

“... 22 June they were forced to surrender.A few days later in Nancy, the occupying forces arrested a young medical orderly while he was trying to escape into the countryside on an old bicycle without tyres. He was stocky and fit, but somewhat shortsighted, which had disqualified him from active military service. Along with more than a thousand other prisoners he ...”

“... Jenny. Diski feels more accurately like me, though it is an entirely invented name to which both Roger-the-Ex and I changed when we got married. There was a gasp and then a brief silence.‘How are you?’I was 11 when she had last known me, but what else was there to say?‘I’m well, thank you.’I explained that I was a writer these days and was thinking ...”

“... with Nehru, who was in prison. When Nehru came to tea her father introduced her, saying: ‘My young daughter, alas, is a great admirer of yours.’ In a later exchange of letters Nehru explained Indian history to her, and told her what a good thing it was that she was being radicalised. Scared that her father might see these letters, she destroyed ...”

“... dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is ...”