“... get them on her side. There were limits to what she wanted to discuss.Years later, in 1967, when Michael Holroyd’s biography of Strachey was about to appear, Grant, then in his eighties, was alarmed at what it was going to reveal, especially about his affairs with Strachey and Maynard Keynes more than half a century earlier. Homosexual acts had just been ...”

“... seemed bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight. 10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmons animated film about a pig who ...”

“... guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the ...”

“... alter Virginia and Leonard had talked with her and tried to comfort her. In September 1934 Roger Fry died of a heart attack. These and other deaths affected her deeply, and her letters about them are movingly simple. To Carrington: ‘I find I cant write without suddenly thinking Oh but Lytton wont read this, and it takes all the point out of it. I always ...”

“... Then you look at the photos again. At times the authors’ concern to do right by the small fry betrays a disconcertingly US-centric distribution of concerns. They stress that the camera, if not downright mendacious, often proves economical with the reality. ‘Photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is ...”

“... of Oil Painting and Drawing as Associated with It, a primer published in 1910, the year Roger Fry organised the first London exhibition of Post-Impressionism. Solomon’s mistrust of ‘modernity’ and the ‘overstrange’ would be carried over into the practice of camouflage, where such gestures were all too likely, as he saw it, to prove ...”

“... for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was ...”

“... her mother died of cancer, and three years later her father also died: her eldest brother, Michael, took legal guardianship of Stein and their brother Leo. He was such a talented businessman and investor that Stein had a private income for life.Then followed the period of Stein’s education. In 1893, when she was nineteen, she enrolled at the Harvard ...”

“... the English five or ten or twenty quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person: Elizabeth Fry or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, depending on whether it’s a five or ten or twenty. On the other we have a picture of the queen, and just above that the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of’, and then the value of the note, and the ...”