“... house with embroidered curtains, a stereo, a television, a large drinks bar made of finely worked wood and framed photos of him and his wife, Rosa-Isela, Pancho’s sister. ‘All this comes from my work,’ he says sadly, standing in the middle of the living-room, in front of a blue velour sofa where a small child is sleeping calmly. ‘But I fell into ...”

“... burden. The cofferdams are required to detour around recovered stakes of ancient blackened wood, Anglo-Saxon fish traps. Experienced divers submerge in lightless filth. Triple-glazed windows and complimentary holidays don’t help the Thamesbank witnesses. The collateral damage of excavation has forced them to yield their privileged views and move ...”

“... in July 1970, he had another breakdown and was admitted to Greenwoods Nursing Home in St John’s Wood. This was too much for Blackwood. ‘I am going away,’ she wrote to say. ‘If I see you when you are so sick I know everything between us will become distorted and destroyed. Your sickness is so distressing to me and I am so bound up with you that I ...”

“... Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers at Schmidts in Charlotte Street or Romano Santi’s in Soho. No glamour today, I think as I stand at the lights at Wardour Street waiting to cycle up past the Queen’s, though maybe some young man down from Oxford for the weekend finds it as exciting now as I did then, but ...”

“... old-fashioned viewing machine – a kind of antique stereopticon – made of brass and polished wood, with a double eyepiece and hand crank. It was all too exquisite and Proustian to resist. Like silent-film cameramen Bridget and I took our seats and eagerly began to crank.Yet hellish indeed what assailed us. Trench-pix again – in lots of 20 – but now ...”

“... life. Claribel’s Mother Take the Wheel Away’ is typical. ‘Claribel’ was the pen-name of Charlotte Alington Barnard, née Pye (1830-69), who probably took her name from Tennyson’s poem. Like him, she came from Lincolnshire. She began composing after marrying a parson while still (probably) in love with a barrister she was engaged to before her ...”

“... Scotland’s great contribution came from the engineer William Symington, whose paddle steamer Charlotte Dundas, built in 1801, was a mechanical triumph let down in the end by his nervous backers (though it encouraged the later schemes of Fulton and Bell). Compared with Symington, Bell was the lesser engineer and the greater enthusiast, the better talker ...”