“... I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in his phrasing there was, as there ...”

“... was an era of snowdrifts and fuel shortages, whalemeat, ‘hardship and high endeavour’. The summers, he reminds us, ‘were long and hot. And whatever the season, peace brought with it a sustained outbreak of pleasure.’ There were jobs for all, but few could yet afford even a little Standard or Morris Ten, and most had never dreamt of Mediterranean ...”

“... Socialism, 36 Gilden Road, London NW5’. The brilliant young Trotskyist David Widgery may have had a hand in that family tree. He had recently joined the International Socialists, the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party. (He went on to become part of the editorial team of OZ, at the time of the famous obscenity trial over its ...”

“... West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is ...”

“... but the ship itself was realised by others. In Glasgow, John Robertson made the engine and David Napier the boiler, while John Wood in Port Glasgow built the wooden hull and installed the machinery. The result was a marvel, the prototype of a steamer fleet that would revolutionise travel on the Clyde by 1820, when two dozen of them sailed every day ...”

“... entirely not partly autobiographical. I’ve just compressed the time a little and perhaps put two summers together, or put things a bit out of sequence – but it’s all straight fact.’ Lowell wrote to her to say that it read ‘as though you weren’t writing at all, but just talking in a full noisy room, talking until suddenly everyone is quiet.’ He ...”

“... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...”