“... men to the devastations of the First World War, my eye fell on an open bible next to her. The passage was from Luke: ‘Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the Word.’ Memory was the issue for Mr ...”

“... Divided Self. I remember it because it stuck out a bit beside the Edwardian set of the novels of Charles Dickens, picked up at a jumble sale or second-hand shop, and the books we actually read, stories by Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner and Agatha Christie. When my eldest sister went to Birmingham University to study English in the mid 1970s the bookshelf ...”

“... as traversed by a series of boundaries, which, once crossed, could never be uncrossed, for their passage left an indelible mark: some knowledge was acquired, some experience gained, innocence lost, a new shamelessness entered into. One summer’s night, sitting in a shabby club in Crawford Street frequented by young burglars and male hustlers, a club of a ...”

“... on the stairwell,’ one fire officer told me, ‘and that … well, the stairs should allow safe passage, with hydraulic or weighted doors.’ The gas pipes that ran around the corridors and in and out of the stairwell passed through unsealed holes that allowed smoke and flames to pass through very easily. Residents who weren’t too high up, and who could ...”