“... part of one when I was 12 or 13; I’d merely registered some of the titles on the spines of the green Penguin books on my parents’ shelves. This came as a shock – I’m still not sure why Marsh escaped me then, except that she may have seemed in some mysterious way more of a grown-up taste than Dorothy L. Sayers or Christie – but being a completist I ...”

“... emerges in these books like a heat map, flaring in patches round the edges at Shepherd’s Bush Green or Clapham Common, where activity concentrates at night around public lavatories, and further out, at Wimbledon Common (‘exactly five miles from the bright lights of Piccadilly’), where in 1963 a reporter from the News of the World, high on ...”

“... Adam Ant and modelled my character on the latest prodigy on the violin scene, a rockabilly called Nigel Kennedy. I developed a quiff and a nasal Bromley twang, wore my costume at home and at work, and never came out of character, even when going to confession at the Holy Redeemer in Cheyne Row. My fake London accent couldn’t have been that successful ...”

“... at the gardens then to Daylesford Organic Farm Shop for lunch. The colour scheme is that greyish green one was first conscious of 40 years ago when Canonbury and Islington took it up and then the National Trust: ‘tasteful green’ it might be called (it’s the colour of the coalhouse door in Yorkshire). It’s a ...”

“... veer towards Fotherington-Thomas – ‘he sa Hullo clouds hullo sky he is a girlie,’ as Nigel Molesworth reported in Down with Skool. But in parts they retain a curious charm (‘We cannot see God, for He is invisible; but we can see His works, and worship His footsteps in the green sod’) and their impact was ...”

“... course there was the drinking. Bruce died in 1974. After an interval, his widow gave his papers to Nigel Jones, whose 1991 biography of Hamilton was followed two years later by a less substantial Life written by Sean French. Between them, these biographers raised their subject to his current position as the go-to guy for shabby-genteel, pub-dwelling pre-colour ...”

“... triumphant speech in the early hours of the morning when the referendum count was nearly complete, Nigel Farage concluded: ‘Let June the 23rd go down in our history as our independence day!’ The phrasing and the cadence told you that he wasn’t referring to India or America’s annual celebration of their freedom from imperial Britain. How could he be? He ...”

“... was parked described it. What I remember is seeing flashing lights of all colours: red, blue, green and a horrendous noise that actually went right down into your body. But there was like a vacuum after that, there was silence and then all of a sudden there was this swishing sound and everything just went berserk … and then we saw it in its full ...”

“... attention as they had devoted to the Falklands conflict. Instead of names like Bluff Cove, Goose Green and Mount Longdon, they became familiar with pits like Shirebrook, Manton and Bilston Glen. All good boy’s own stuff. Thatcher herself was clearly not averse to this sort of thing: her special adviser David Hart sent her a typically vainglorious note as ...”

“... about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the ...”

“... men like Rod Hull clowning around on stage with a girl like Lena Zavaroni. You got used to Hughie Green holding the little girl’s hand and asking her if she wanted an ice-cream. Far from wanting an ice-cream, the little girl was starving herself to death while helpfully glazing over for the camera and throwing out her hands and singing ‘Mama, He’s ...”

“... of the myth, Robin Hood is a tax-cutter and a handout-denouncer. He’s Jeremy Clarkson. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1000. He’s in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering ...”

“... book is a document of the way the architects involved saw this process. Keeling House, Bethnal Green Bruno Ahrends, like so many German-Jewish emigrés, was interned at the start of the Second World War as an ‘enemy alien’ – stuck for the duration in Douglas on the Isle of Man. There he created dream images straight out of the unbuilt projects of ...”

“... a sun-bleached cloth poppy fastened to the back rest. It’s a memorial to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died ...”

“... which I find the most attractive of flowers. Aconites, snug and tight-budded in their cosy green frills, always cheer me up, much more than the ragged and anaemic snowdrops, of which we have a profusion.14 February, Yorkshire. When we had the central heating overhauled a slightly larger radiator was put in the downstairs loo. It’s a small room ...”