“... Seven Sisters colleges, almost as if I myself had attended one. Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Sarah Lawrence … The very names seem aphrodisiac, hallucinatory, like magic portents. I will finally come around, shocked back into sentience by Blakey and Bev’s instant joint diktat, as soon as they hear the jumbled story of my encounter: You must put this ...”

“... Inadmissible Evidence (with Nicol Williamson) and A Patriot for Me (which, along with Edward Bond’s later Saved, can be credited with having brought about the end of theatre censorship). Moving through two further marriages in quick succession (to Mary Ure, who played his first wife in Look Back in Anger, then to Penelope Gilliatt, the film ...”

“... expressions: à la mode, chic, soignée, distingué/e, raffiné/e, correcte, bien dans sa peau, en beauté, haut ton, bon ton, mignon/ne, gamin/e; this gave them permission to behave in certain ways, ways that were fervently envied, while others were to be mocked at best, shunned at worst (louche, arriviste, parvenu, outré, richissime, nouveau ...”

“... followed the Greeks. His Eclipse of Action starts with an account of the Oresteia and ends with Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a viscerally shocking play which reworks atrocities from tragic tradition. As turning points, he focuses, like Pollard, on Hamlet but also on Samson Agonistes. He gives an ingenious account of the latter as a self-consciously failed mixed ...”

“... drove away a bomb went off in the car. She lost both legs and suffered fatal abdominal injuries. Sarah, the youngest of her three children, was on her break at the primary school fifty yards away when the bomb went off. The two boys were on a school trip to France. Her husband was at work. Mrs Nelson had just come back from a few days in Donegal. Her car had ...”

“... senses she is right. Yet he can’t break free from the idea that he and Obama have a special bond, something that transcends their personal circumstances. He persuades himself early on that, notwithstanding their very different backgrounds, he and the president are similar people. We both have large groups of friends but maintain a sense of privacy that ...”

“... he’d conjured out of a tennis academy and a rehab centre’. In other words, a saint of 20 lb bond paper, who must have worked in a state of enthralled and transcendent boredom, of the type that Wallace had made it his mission to describe. Pietsch assures us that had Wallace been in charge of the final product it would not have contained so many ...”

“... than she does without it … She seems to me an example of a country more emancipated from every bond, not only of despotism but of ordinary law, than any so-called civilised country was before – a country revelling in odious forms of irresponsibility & licence. And surely, how can one speak of the Irish as a ‘great people’? I see no greatness, nor any ...”

“... by his being on crutches. He had been knocked down by a car when stepping off an island in Bond Street, just before or after we moved house; I think it was before. It was a partial cause of his death at the age of 53, probably in 1931, but possibly in 1930: I am certain about the 53 because from then on my mother was always saying that that was the age ...”