“... 1952 choked bankers and paupers alike (it brought a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells to a close because no one could see the stage). In the years immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over ...”

“... Price should have met on the stairs. Clarissa, like ‘a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower’, ascends at once to her attic bedroom. Here, at the top of the house, in its most private space, rapture does finally seize her as she recalls the intense arousal she has in the past experienced in the presence of other women (for ‘she did undoubtedly ...”

“... remarkable were they in Rotherham, say, but are more so here, in that like the Vicars’ Close at Wells they turn out to be medieval. The church of course is medieval, too, with over the wall, and just visible in a traditional configuration of church and state, the manor house, home of the Horners. Opposite the church door is Munnings’s equestrian statue of ...”

“... close to veneration. A few days after Martha Gellhorn’s ashes were scattered in the Thames near Tower Bridge, I went back to her flat near the King’s Road to collect some books that she’d left me. I’d made the journey often from North London to Sloane Square, walking away from the Royal Court Theatre, rounding Peter Jones on Symons Street and turning ...”

“... see the kitchen fold,’ said one man whose house largely disappeared. The lifeboat crew in Wells-next-the-Sea filmed themselves being driven back up the stairs of their boathouse by a rush of foaming water. In Burnham Overy Staithe, my partner’s father walked down the lane seaward from his house, usually separated from the sea by an expanse of ...”

“... Beatrice Lillie (and fairies at the bottom of the garden), Elmore James, Giulio Cesare, Miss Kitty Wells, Vespro della beata vergine, South Pacific, Pet Sounds, Les Négresses Vertes, Dusty in Memphis, Ferrier’s Kindertötenlieder, Toots and the Maytals, Têtes Raides, Lulu, Lulu – even Gurdjieff’s potty piano ramblings. He always makes me think of ...”

“... family, corrupting all other parties, has done irreparable harm to Indian democracy, poisoning the wells of public life.*Among so many degenerative symptoms in the executive and legislatures alike, one antibody in the constitution has stood out. The Supreme Court, which had not played a particularly distinguished role under Nehru, disgraced itself by ...”