“... he wrote up in Remote People, one of several good travel books of this period. (Indeed, along with Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, Waugh has some claim to have invented the modern travel book.) He took to Addis Ababa during the celebrations, its ‘tangle of modernism and barbarity’ giving it a ‘crazy enchantment’ that he likened to Alice in ...”

“... rest of it is a film set, cranking out heritage for export: crinoline frolics and The Madness of King George. I’d barely set foot outside my first secondhand bookshop when I was pounced on by a two-person television crew doing a vox pop on the Dome. There was a man hefting a DVC camera and a woman with a clipboard. After a morning trying to tease a story ...”

“... expanded, until eventually Levy set up his own small record label, Magnet. One of his clients, Peter Shelley, wrote a song called ‘My Coo-Ca-Choo’, and they advertised for someone to sing it. Then this happened: I had mixed feelings when a flamboyant, blond-haired 31-year-old knocked on our basement door a few days later and said he was our ...”

“... In the spring of 1958, my family moved from a rat-haunted tenement on King Street to one of the last remaining prefabs in Cowdenbeath. It was a move up, in most ways; the prefabs had been built as temporary wartime accommodation but, to my child’s mind at least, the cold and the damp, the putty-tainted pools of condensation on winter mornings and the airless heat of August afternoons were minor concerns compared with the pleasure of living on our own garden plot, in what was, essentially, a detached house, just yards from a stand of high beech trees where tawny owls hunted through the night, their to-and-fro cries so close it seemed they were right there with us, in the tiny bedroom I shared with my sister, Margaret ...”

“... for her mother’s work, was born in 1957, a year after Brophy published her second novel, The King of a Rainy Country, an ‘autobiography or fake autobiography’ in which young Londoners take a road trip to Venice (it will appear from McNally Editions next year).Murdoch was supportive of Brophy’s books, which is more than you can say of Brophy, who ...”

“... father wears ‘a white drill suit and a helmet with a nipple at the top’. In Henderson the Rain King, Henderson has a ‘helmet with its nipple at the top’. In Seize the day, Mr Rappaport’s ear cartilage is ‘twisted like a cabbage heart’, while in Humboldt’s Gift a Pole called Casey has ears that are ‘amazingly crinkled, like Chinese ...”

“... in university/state relations occurred in the second half of the century. Oxford rallied to the King during the difficulties over the American colonies, and changes were introduced in college and university to strengthen teaching and internal discipline. It is pleasing to have some of my own views on the origins of honours examinations in late Georgian ...”

“... the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d ...”

“... brightly, perhaps, on Iselin. I love Iselin and I believe in her. She just wants to eat Burger King and then more Burger King, while inner-monologuing like this:What was it I’d thought in the loo while I’d been doing my make-up?That I looked exotic with my gold eyeshadow. Arabian nights, passionate and strong.On my ...”

“... Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat and scarf to match with a grey fedora ...”

“... and in 1900 returned to the Congo, part of which was under the direct control of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. He began to investigate allegations of brutality in the region; his work was thorough and conscientious, and he was personally responsible for the decision of the Foreign Office to undertake a serious investigation of what was happening in ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... has gone on to normalise the extreme aberration in a way that recalls the passive compliance of King Victor Emmanuel III in 1922 and Field Marshal Hindenburg in 1933. Yet it is the ‘resistance’ warriors in the popular culture who have gone furthest to take political confrontation to a perilous edge. Robert De Niro led a cheer of ‘Fuck Trump’ at the ...”

“... to expose the relationship.In one respect Murray’s account is less informative than David King Dunaway’s in Huxley in Hollywood (1989). Dunaway, unlike Murray, spoke to Rosalind Bruce Huxley, Leonard’s second wife. Even after seventy years, her recollection was brutal: ‘The girl was village educated in a mild way. It couldn’t have worked. His ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”