“... Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and ...”

“... Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in the strange case of Assange. But there is something else about the genre, a sense that the world might be more ghosted now than at any time in history. Isn’t Wikipedia entirely ghosted? Isn’t ...”

“... Ellen but Nellie, a name-form that peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ...”

“... worry,’ said Delia. ‘Two months of this place and you’ll be saying “shit” with the best of them.’ (She actually meant ‘fuck’ but didn’t think Mrs Donaldson was quite ready for this yet.) Her other performance was as one of the group when she had, like the rest of them, to pretend to be whatever the case notes required … a grieving ...”

“... so tried to avoid products like paper towels or plastics linked to deforestation. But despite her best efforts, she simply wasn’t able to manage it. What’s more, this framing ignores the fact that people living in different parts of the world have very different per capita emissions, and that overconsumption in the Global North means that children born in ...”

“... topic of Political Union. Her explosion at Andreotti’s ambush finished her. In London, Geoffrey Howe took a dim view of her reaction, and within a month she was ejected from office. No wonder she hated her Italian colleagues, to the point of saying: ‘To put it bluntly, if I were an Italian I might prefer rule from Brussels too.’ Thatcher ...”

“... the whole cobwebby structure. The pound was allowed to float free on the foreign exchanges, while Geoffrey Howe’s budgets squeezed inflation out of the economy by raising interest rates sky-high. The combination was lethal. Suddenly, as speculative money rushed into the country, the pound soared to $2.40. Firms faced phenomenally high costs at home, to ...”

“... a chimney-sweep or a coalman rampaged through our spotless house. I look up chimney-sweeps in Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora (shamefully out of print) and find that, the flowers being black and dusty, chimney-sweep and chimney-sweeper are Warwickshire slang for the plantain, particularly the ribwort, and that these were used to bind up ...”

“... him. From Hamburg he wrote to Mary Manning in 1936: ‘All the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar.’ Soon afterwards, he wrote to McGreevy: ‘I have met a lot of friendly people here, mostly painters … They are all more or less suppressed, i.e. cannot exhibit publicly and dare sell only with precaution. The group was broken ...”

“... mouth of the bullfish is drawn with exquisite attention – and that he travelled to some of the best fishing spots in Ireland. But I think that what the drawings say above all is that this was a man who remembered. His drawings were not an imaginative flight into another experience, or a representation of his struggle with inner conflict: there are no ...”

“... about it: ‘Honouring such a man with the highest artistic accolade this state has to offer is at best to be morally neutral about the barbarous cause he served. It is to follow the fascist chic ethic that art counts above all else,’ he wrote in October 1997. Two month later he returned to the subject: ‘Francis Stuart offered his services to the Third ...”

“... to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows. Umbrella rolled, vowels clipped, he sleepwalks through a gone-in-the-mouth city, struggling to make conversation with marooned vagrants and fire-eyed witnesses. The Gainsborough film studios, where Mason established ...”

“... cakes pimpled over like naval mines (Siegfrieds, or Maginots, depending on the waiter’s best guess at the nationality of his clients).It​ took 24 hours to take Austria off the map. German troops crossed the border on 12 March 1938, and the next day, the occupation of Hitler’s country of birth was complete. Hitler rode into Vienna in an open ...”

“... Details had emerged of an undeclared £373,000 loan Mandelson had taken from the Treasury minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house in Notting Hill, an untenable conflict of interest. Mandelson quit, and after a sojourn on Corfu with his ‘old and good friends’ from the Rothschild banking family, passed into his personal Golgotha: a small flat, a Fiat Punto ...”

“... relations with Vivien had been transacted through illness – it was the kind of intimacy he knew best.In America in early 1933 he suggests a curiously Freudian model of knowing, as of doctor and patient: ‘I want to know, How Are You? I mean, frankly and uncircumspectly, as if I were a doctor or a priest.’ And again: ‘I wish you could write to me merely ...”