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“... Scots. M. calls later and recalls how someone he knew picked up Bowie when he was still David Jones. He offered to come round, bringing his guitar as he wanted to try out some songs. They had sex and then he wanted to play, only his host pleaded another appointment and sent him away. How long after this it was that Bowie had his breakthrough I’m not ...”

“... Of the 53 short essays, book reviews, lectures and obituaries assembled in Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s two volumes, two were published in the year before he assumed the Regius Professorship of Greek in the University of Oxford, one was his Inaugural Lecture of 1960, and the remainder were written subsequently. I say this not as a prelude to yet another bad joke about ‘the other place’ but because it is impossible to appreciate the two volumes without some understanding of the course of Classical studies in 20th-century Britain and of the author’s role in them ...”

“... failed all his O-levels except art because he was too busy playing his sax. Born plain old David Jones in Brixton in January 1947, he grew up in Bromley, and spent his first years of struggling would-be stardom in Beckenham. He’d been in half a dozen bands as a saxophonist, a singer and a mime artist; he’d styled himself as a Mod, a hippy and a ...”

“... not feel at home here he would not feel out of place among streets like Greene and Grand and Great Jones, the cast-iron district which I see from my window. I would give him, too, any work by Edward Hopper, whose paintings could often pass as illustrations to the poems of Larkin; and in particular People in the Sun (1960). Finally, something I saw scrawled up ...”

“... Russell Harty on his deathbed had his tracheotomy tube removed, in order to be able to tell Alan Bennett that the princess had asked how he was, twice.Every celebrity seems to have fantasised about sex with the princess. Eddie Fisher claimed that he had had an affair with her. When her marriage was breaking up, Peter Sellers was besotted with the idea ...”

“... Charles and Margaret Thatcher. He used to tell Thatcher stories of the Zulus, to which, J.D.F. Jones was told by a frustrated civil servant, ‘she would listen with delight, her jaw agape.’ (‘No evil thought ever entered his mind,’ she herself assured the biographer.) He accompanied Charles on a brief excursion to the fringes of the Kalahari and ...”

“... me.‘Aren’t you famous?’‘Well I can’t be, can I, if you don’t know my name.’‘It’s Alan something.’‘Yes.’‘From Scarborough?’‘No.’‘So which Alan are you?’‘I’m another Alan.’‘Are you just a lookalike?’‘Well, you could say so.’He pats my arm ...”

“... around those failed politicians, Philip and Algernon. The biographies by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Scott are explicitly concerned to get behind the legends. Philip has been mythologised as the model Renaissance and Protestant courtier, whose courage and heroism led to a tragic early death at the battle of Zutphen in 1586. Algernon has been ...”

“... Part​ of what makes Owen Jones such a phenomenally successful figure by left-of-Labour standards is his ability to be several things at once. He is both insider, reporting back to ‘us’ about what ‘they’ think, and outsider, as shocked and angry about it as ‘we’ might be. He was brought up in Sheffield, Falkirk and Stockport and speaks in a sharp Mancunian accent, but he is also an Oxford graduate, with all the connections that can entail ...”

“... seal. What kind of tax cuts are needed? Cheney wanted to know. How big?’ Cheney’s old friend Alan Greenspan, the excessively revered chairman of the Federal Reserve, wasn’t so keen on the cuts. Large budget deficits lead to higher interest rates in the long term, which in Greenspan’s opinion would more than cancel out any short-term economic benefits ...”

“... indifferent private press books – would not by themselves have warranted a book on the scale of Alan Crawford’s admirable biography. It is Ashbee’s attempts to give practical expression to the idea that art matters that make Crawford’s apology for a book ‘more ponderous than its subject deserves’ unnecessary. Ashbee’s ideas were a legacy of ...”

“... time that a new English novel had been given a full page piece to itself; and the editorship of Alan Pryce-Jones (1948-59), during which the paper ‘became a serious, modern, intellectual journal’, and developed its willingness to comment freely about world events, something it has continued to do very well under its ...”

“... turn to the theatre pages with the excitement that I once did and although contemporaries like Alan Brien lacked Tynan’s flamboyant, showstruck, star-fucking excitement, he too was an invigorating critic to read ... Why Tynan was influential within the theatre is hard to explain.’ (Jonathan Miller, who likes explaining, is particularly interesting when ...”

“... for five years, a deal which favoured the ‘big five’ clubs, who were guaranteed exposure. Alan Sugar, one of several candidates for the title of ‘Thatcher’s favourite entrepreneur’ and chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, ‘stood personally to benefit if Sky got the football’: his electronics company, Amstrad, would get plenty of orders for ...”

“... claims made for it by an annoying American visitor. Then the book swallowed me whole (so thanks to Alan Consolatu for the introduction). I read the Bodley Head edition, whose format, relatively narrow if satisfyingly thick, was somehow slightly too compact for so overreaching a book. The original Paris Ulysses was larger, as if unwilling to share a shelf with ...”