“... as it stayed an available medium for rehearsed entertainment; to find parts in the theatre, in London as well as New York; to act in French and Italian movies; and to appear on talk shows, where he was a great and good holder-forth. Any two minutes of him were apt to bring out something fresh. People think they know what makes a star, but there isn’t ...”

“... scale of Britain’s dirty money problem is well documented. For more than two decades the ‘London laundromat’ has cleaned kleptocratic cash without fear or favour. Since 2008, when Gordon Brown introduced the Tier 1 ‘golden visa’ scheme, 905 Russian millionaires and their families have come to the UK. The scheme was scrapped on 17 ...”

“... pretence that women in the working world (whether a market in Africa or an office building in London) are really just working frivolously, passing the time, working for silly personal expenditures, working, as Moroccans sneer, for ‘lipstick’. Yet even ‘lipstick’ may be made a job necessity: ‘Continental Airlines in 1991 dismissed a young woman ...”

“... of the friends and kin of the fallen, although there’s plenty of that. A Ukrainian friend in London, originally from Donetsk, was in Kyiv a couple of weeks before I arrived. She noticed that the customers in TSUM, a high-end department store on Khreshchatyk, had changed. ‘The main clients used to be IT guys,’ she said. ‘Now it’s a family shopping ...”

“... us. We never considered the stuff on our plates; we thought the school milk came on a lorry from London. Never for a second did my friends and I think of ourselves as coming from a rural community; like all British suburban kids, we lived as dark, twinkling fallout from a big city, in our case Glasgow; and we thought carports and breezeblocks were part of ...”

“... out. Essentially, it is a nondescript straggle of houses sandwiched uncomfortably between the vast London Valley Brickyard in the Marston Valley on one side, with its hundreds of sulphurous chimneys, and the airfield on the other side, a leftover from the Second World War which has since become a college of aeronautics.When I was a boy, the village reeked of ...”

“... novel The Rotters’ Club.5 The last, and most famous, was the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis (‘Jack’) and Charles Williams, at Oxford in the 1930s. On this subject, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1978 study, The Inklings, last revised in 1997, is the place to start.Religion: Mabel, his widowed mother, was a Roman Catholic convert, and Tolkien at least believed ...”