“... born, that fifty members of the Prevezer family – cousins and aunts and uncles of their mother, Lynn – had been murdered in the Holocaust. ‘My disastrous Judaism of fathers and family transmogrified into a personal, protestant inwardness and independence. Yet, as with the varieties of historical Protestantism … the independence gained … comes at the ...”

“... the working-class boyo, penetrated the middle classes, beginning with the ‘rivetingly glamorous Lynn Barber’, a future journalist who never forgot the experience. Onward and upward: bent aristos, dopers with great collections of blues records. A brief affair with the daughter of the champion of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, Master of ...”

“... Harbor – even if that respect is filtered through the figures of Prewitt, Maggio and Warden from James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, a novel that plainly means a lot to her.) Over the years since 1963, Didion has won a high reputation as a political journalist/ commentator. I’ve never been quite as sure of that talent, if only because American politics ...”

“... or (a regular visitor) the woodpecker.29 August, Paris. A nice experience this afternoon when with Lynn we go into a creperie opposite the St Germain covered market hoping for some tea, in the window a solitary piece of cake. The young woman in charge smilingly refuses to serve it to us as it is part of an experiment that hasn’t worked. We say it looks ...”