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“... from the Cedar Tavern set, the Abstract Expressionists. You could be a fag back then, like Frank O’Hara, as long as you could pass, and understood you were supposed to suffer over it, lusting after those real guys painting their heroic, tortured canvases. Andy was a swish. A swish was someone who couldn’t hide it.One contemporary noted the ...”

“... front of our apartment, I was always jumping all over them in a passion.In Straight Life Pepper is frank – and hilarious – on the subject of his looks. Detailing his stay in an expensive detox sanitorium in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, he recalls prinking about in the nude after getting some huge shots of morphine to mitigate the symptoms of heroin ...”

“... be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable – to be left alone: what Henry James once described as ‘uncontested possession of the long, sweet, stupid day’: that peace to which no living creature has a natural right. Yes, for a time I was decidedly neurotic on the subject of my friends. I even imagined a kinship with Dorothy ...”

“... with in-jokes. But in her journal, she documented her disappointment at not being accepted for Frank O’Connor’s writing seminar at Harvard as it leaked into every area of her life, and into her sentences, which flicker between the first and second person:You looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being ...”

“... to the Continent, and Japanese financial firms might well follow, while even the Brexiteer James Dyson was moving his vacuum-cleaner manufacture to Singapore. Nor was there any widespread support for Brexit in Northern Ireland or Scotland, risking the unity of Great Britain. He had changed his mind, and urged others to do the same. But where, he ...”

“... private lives, on the other. The book, I said, should be revealing on all fronts, but also be frank about revelation itself. If he could not discuss a matter of importance – his son, for example, and the custody battle, or what happened in bed with the two Swedish girls – we should seek to explain why in a statement about sleaze. I said what we ...”

“... of the judiciary. On the occasion of his retirement as Recorder of London in July 1990, Sir James Miskin gave a television interview to the BBC. ‘That was a mad decision, was it not?’ he said of the Court of Appeal’s judgment in the Guildford case. ‘They didn’t give any thought to the fact that three years after it had happened there was a ...”

“... where my fingers were straying. Here were the memoirs of a few dandies of the turn of the century, Frank Harris and Boni de Castellane, and a copy of the commonplace book of the mysterious Comtesse Diane, but it was the books on the left-hand side of the shelf to which destiny was leading me. Slowly I crossed my right hand over my left hand, and, after the ...”