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“... reference or their footnote helplessly adrift from its moorings. Priests of the cause like Leonard Schapiro, Hayek and Carlos Rangel are caught and mangled like everybody else. The author’s lengthy meditations at II Trebbio (responsible for much of the book’s message, we learn in the Preface) did not leave him time to learn the correct Tuscan for ...”

“... Mike tells her that derivatives are ‘freakish’ – straightforward gambling contracts. The Leonard Cohen song ‘Everybody Knows’ is his theme tune: everybody knows that what they’re doing is sleazy, risky and untenable; everybody knows that someday it’s going to implode. Getting the world of work right in fiction is difficult. Get bogged down in ...”

“... enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L. and say stay this moment. Her going in to see Leonard, and murmur to him her version of the line from Faust, moves us more than the idea itself. Ever since the Romantics the notion of being a passive recorder, a chameleon, a Proteus of the fire and flood, a vessel of negative capability, had not ceased to ...”

“... the latter had done). One of my Dublin cousins came up with a generous suggestion. His father, Tom O’Brien, an erstwhile comrade-in-arms, was also buried in Mount Pleasant. Tom’s wife, Ann, my mother’s sister, still very much alive, was Jewish and had declared her intention of being buried in the Jewish ...”

“... John has gone downstairs to see them off. Mrs E’s voice rises ‘Oh don’t commiserate Tom; he’s quite happy.’ I know it’s extravagant … but I dislike her so immensely. She really repels me. She makes me shiver with apprehension … I don’t dare to think what she is ‘seeing’. From the moment that John dropped a spoon & she cried: ‘I ...”

“... Tony Parsons is the talented journalist who used to play Leonard Bast to Tom Paulin’s rentier intellectual on Late Review, the BBC’s weekly parade of Schlegelisms. He was the mean little man with the Estuary accent who was entitled to his views. He currently writes a column for the Mirror and his opinions spill forth also now in novels ...”

“... stall and flip and spin and burst into flames. Before I went to Italy, I took my nine-year-old son Tom to Duxford Air Museum to see a Bristol Fighter up close. It was bigger than I expected, with a wingspan of nearly forty feet, but it looked like a box kite, all struts and laced-up canvas. It fascinated Tom – the sort of ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... in his desk drawer, had at last been shown to friends in London. Rosamond Lehmann had praised it; Leonard Woolf wanted to publish it. The story was Olivia; the author, anonymous on publication in 1949, was Dorothy Strachey Bussy, Lytton Strachey’s sister. Olivia is a piece of spirited homage, by a woman both spirited and prone to homage. Dorothy Strachey ...”

“... eighty, published her personal tribute in the Times. The two women had been friends of a sort (Leonard disapproved): both were leading lights in famous circles of famous friends; both possessed a conversational brilliance liable to be iced with cruelty, an intensity threatening always to pitch into dangerous hilarity. Margot remembered her first sighting ...”

“... didn’t prevent her from being visited by an admirer or two. In 1641, she gave a shilling to Mr Tom Aston and Mr Dick Gravell, who, she wrote, ‘cam to be my valantine’. As a single woman, she couldn’t attend female neighbours who were giving birth, but she would send money to midwives and nurses. When her niece produced twins, Jeffreys stood as ...”

“... not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ‘Beachcomber’. Enough of that; the game is too easy to play. The entries are skilfully ‘potted’, judicious in the DNB manner, but the more one browses the more it is apparent that a double ...”

“... moved closer to the present, though, his plots have mutated from dark conspiracies into Elmore Leonard-ish capers. The tone has become sunnier: fewer good guys are killed off, and the hero usually ends up getting the girl. Most of all, the high-tech stuff has moved from fantasy to something more like punditry. Gibson often seems as interested in technology ...”

“... Larkin must have refused the laureateship (he later realised Larkin wasn’t asked), he writes to Leonard and Lisa Baskin that ‘his general all-purpose No seems to me not so admirable, & there were attractions in turning mightily to my advantage what he’d shied from.’ Again we see his canniness. Learning that Larkin has cancer, he writes with details of ...”

“... of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of one-way crack, or ‘entertaining conversation. Ir craic is the ModE ...”