“... to turn it over in his hands as he talks; normally he’d smoke through his lunch hour. He’s wearing long jean shorts and a Homer Simpson T-shirt; his eyes are ringed with yellow-blue shadows. ‘To be honest, this place takes so much out of me,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to pull away when I get home. I certainly swear at home more because I’m allowed ...”

“... 100 Agents of Change’ in the waste debate. Standing at number 28 – one above new entrant David Miliband, the environment secretary – is a man called Andy Moore, who is head of the Community Recycling Network. The first time I met him, in the bar at Paddington Station, he seemed weary but refreshingly non-morose when it came to talking about ...”

“... by an oddly coloured bird, a zigzag moulding around the doorway of a nearby church, a woman wearing a burqa, the impenetrable calligraphy of a foreign road sign?The main​ concentration of troops was in north-eastern France towards the Belgian border, the same area that the British, French and Germans had turned into a welter of mud and blood in the ...”

“... of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely available, I only half believed I could coerce my body, and suspected that it might have some ...”

“... saw people in robes kneeling around a fire, then a corpse. He saw a person in a red robe who was wearing a helmet of cloth: he thought this might be the Devil. People were wailing. He remembered standing on a platform and having to sacrifice a black cat. The Ingram girls heard about these revelations from the pastor. At first Ericka said her father was ...”

“... Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Gilmore forswore further appeals and faced the firing squad wearing his famously indestructible Timex watch: scarcely typical and followed by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one in 1981, the year France abandoned capital punishment. If not de jure, then de facto, the United States ...”

“... wrote, ‘was that she evolved this part to play: How to Be the Woman Writer. Not that she was wearing a mask exactly: it was more a matter of refusing to observe any decorous distinction between art and life.’ One aspect of this, Sage wrote, was the ‘fairy godmother’ act that Carter performed more and more as she grew older and more settled: the ...”

“... the fire, at the nursery school, Fethia had practised a new dance routine in the garden. She was wearing white leather shoes with flowers on the front, and, while she was dancing, one of the flowers came off and got lost. She was upset. At the end of the day her teacher found the flower and put it next to Fethia’s peg. It would be there the next ...”

“... I have on a pale shirt-waister dress which falls below my knees, and a cardigan over it. I’m wearing thonged sandals so it must have been a sunny day, but for all that, my hands are covered in short white gloves. Very smart, very nice, my mother would have thought. She is in a floral frock, belted at the waist and falling almost to her ankles, as all her ...”

“... who are trying to watch over a two-year-old boy ‘who had wet his pants and had no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt’. The girls say the boy had been handed to them by a Border Patrol agent, who went into their cell and asked: ‘Who wants to take care of this little boy?’*June is the hottest June in recorded history. In the heatwave in ...”

“... too slow and polite to speak up … the couple are coming to supper this week.’ The couple was David and Assia Wevill. In September they moved and began furnishing their fourth home in as many years. It turned cold, another record-breaking winter, and it was months until they could afford carpets. ‘I am dying for a Bendix!’ Sylvia wrote to her ...”

“... and garlic. He was saved by two women. The first was Mishmish Or, who found him one night in a bar wearing only his underwear. She was an Israeli Jew in her mid-twenties, the daughter of a Turkish father and an Egyptian mother, a costume designer, and the mother of a two-year-old daughter, Keshet. She took him home that night; he moved in, and became a ...”

“... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...”

“... and the Atlantic. I parked outside the office block. In the distance a small group of workers wearing high-viz overalls were occupied preparing one of the last sections for shipment. I’d been told the automatic doors to reception were broken and, sure enough, they wouldn’t budge. I worked my fingers into the rubber strips in the divide and prised them ...”

“... Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he ...”