“... that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna Ali. They all went to Falafel King afterwards to have lemonade. They just sat at the window watching the world go by, and they discussed Ramadan. Naseem promised to come to Grenfell Tower so they could break their fast together and make her famous cheese pie. ‘It had been such a big iftar ...”

“... to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been ...”

“... she took me instead. I stood outside South Africa House waiting, while she disappeared into St Martin-in-the-Fields. I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was doing and she didn’t tell me. I used it as a key scene in my novel, The Dream Mistress. I remember it very clearly. Even so, It was a jolt to hear it being confirmed by someone else. Confirmed, but ...”

“... West Germany’s 8-3 loss to Hungary in the group stage in 1954 is explicated via the theologian Martin Schloemann’s hypothesis that the saying derives not as commonly assumed from a remark of Luther’s, but rather from a 19th-century woodcut depiction of Luther that became a common symbol of reconstruction after the Second World War. There are footnotes ...”