“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”

“... use. The water either remains altogether or comes out as innocent as it entered.’ Pills he took did not help, he wrote again, they brought ‘a species of abortive diarrhoea. That is I felt the most reiterated & most violent inclination to stool, without being able to effect anything save the passage of a little blood.’ He saw a doctor who ...”

“... London in 1962. The first thing Martha did was show me a photograph of Tony as a baby, which she took out of her Freedom Pass wallet. Martha is eighty; when Tony died she was in her forties. ‘We knew that Tony’s job came with certain risks,’ Andy told me. ‘We’re not naive. Had he been killed in the line of duty, it would have been heartbreaking and ...”

“... initially not linked to London by a high-speed line; without it, the journey to Brussels and Paris took more than half an hour longer. It was only when François Mitterrand embarrassed the British government in his speech at the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 by observing that at least visitors to the UK would have time to admire the Kent countryside ...”

“... When satire becomes surrealistic it drops off the map of genre. Unlike other Amis characters (John Self, Keith Talent, Clint Smoker), the arch-lout Asbo doesn’t carry around a name whose oddity and associations he is forbidden by the rules of the novel that contains him from recognising. He changed his name on his 18th birthday to harmonise with the ...”

“... arising from the sea. The cheeks became more hollow, the eyes more prominent, and the mouth took on the permanent curve of lips that are determined not to cry. Towards the end of her life, she looked like a hungry insect magnified a million times – a praying mantis that had forgotten how to pray. Even her springy posture started to resemble the stance ...”

“... briefly (as he did in recording, for Larkin’s delight, his response to an unimpressive poem by John Wain): ‘Could of told you that, shitface.’ Amis was not born into the literary purple, as many of the Bloomsburyish or Bloomsbury-affiliated writers of the previous generation had been, and this humbler background was thought to be somehow explanatory of ...”

“... art communard emptying pockets and bags to find enough coins for a pint in the Palm Tree took me back to 1969 and the moment when real money, the paper kind that came with a few silver coins in a small brown envelope, disappeared. For ever. I had a casual labouring job, unloading containers and stacking trucks and vans in muddy sheds alongside the ...”

“... of another critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin Film Festival. Over dinner he took pleasure in regaling us with stories of the male to female transsexual prostitutes he had met on the city’s streets, and how difficult it was to ‘complete’ the transaction since the transsexual body interprets the surgically created vagina as a wound ...”

“... all sorts of things, root and branch, it sometimes seems that the one constant was the pride she took in being a good socialist of a quite straightforward sort. (It seems, from Gordon’s account, that socialism was just about the only thing Carter wanted to inherit from her mother, a lifelong Labour supporter. Unlike her adored father, who had been, she was ...”

“... it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, should …’ she took a moment to get the wording right: ‘Is it OK to still have children?’ Her comment spawned a flurry of pieces on why you should or should not procreate. But the thorny question of whether it is OK to have children – a question about what we owe one ...”

“... to be sure of a decent living in East Anglia. I went to see Agnew one May morning. Google Maps took me west out of Norwich on a fast road screened by trees from the countryside, then ushered me into the dense latticework of lanes on either side of the highway. It was hard to get a sense of the land beyond the hedgerows and woods and shaggy verges, but ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”

“... Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some renovated pagan sense tiresome and offensive too. In Cohen’s view, no doubt the most interesting thing her trio of subjects shared was an unorthodox ‘set of ...”

“... At Windsor it was the evening of the state banquet and as the president of France took his place beside Her Majesty, the royal family formed up behind and the procession slowly moved off and through into the Waterloo Chamber. ‘Now that I have you to myself,’ said the Queen, smiling to left and right as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet ...”