“... in the road with a fistful of windscreen wipers, trying to sell them to passing drivers. It was White City that day, the security designation for a place where incidents were already happening or likely to happen. That morning, four suicide bombers had attacked Karzai’s palace and we could still see the smoke. ...”

“... na Mara (‘shieling of the sea’) in Kilpheder (from the Gaelic Cille-pheadair, or ‘church of Peter’). Ten square miles of machair stretch from the western dunes to the eastern rocky moors. This is a plain of shell-sand, where millions of cockles and whelks, razor-shells and buckies, ground into ivory fragments smaller than a baby’s fingernail, have ...”

“... knees towards the noise of the crickets. He sees no more of the post as he passes than a blur of white among a throng of his rivals. There is no one to tell him whether or not he has got up to win.’ A few weeks later, Clementia breaks a leg while training and Augustine puts her down. Now baptised, Jean confesses that she became pregnant on the night of the ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the ...”

“... sunlight at an elegant (looted) walnut table sits a Japanese officer, in a uniform jacket with a white open-necked shirt. Alan remembers the grenade in his pocket and pulls it out to throw. A startled sentry wakes up and shoots at him; the bullet goes through his shoulder. The grenade drops and rolls a few feet. As he scrabbles to pick it up and throw it ...”

“... feels, is altogether too old and she did not share his belief that if Reagan could make it to the White House he could do the same. She adds the surprising comment that he is more suited to the trench warfare of Fleet Street than to the battle-lines of politics. In her view, demobilisation loomed. Roy Jenkins is capable of generous and spontaneous ...”

“... During the course of the next week, I was to make several similar errors. Names like Patrick White and A.D. Hope were greeted with candid derision, and nobody had heard of Clive James.* When, at one of the actual Festival’s talk-ins, I said that it was odd to find Peter Porter missing from various standard ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”

“... and shattering,’ says the blurb, ‘Savage Grace stands beside such classics as White Mischief and In Cold Blood.’ And what makes a classic in this genre? And why no mention of The Executioner’s Song and Mrs Trilling’s Mrs Harris? Never mind. The aim seems to be a succès de scandale purified by some sort of message. But hardly less ...”

“... just because they are so laughable – the viewpoint of Wodehouse, Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Peter Simple. The term ‘novelty’, which now gets translated as ‘trendy’ or ‘fashionable’, becomes a dirty word. ‘Feeling profound or vehement’ is reserved for those who wish to change society – for Tony Benn, the ‘Race Relations ...”

“... 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship between guide and history. Peter Cunningham had followed his guide to Westminster Abbey of 1842 with a two-volume historical Handbook of London, which went through two editions in 1849-1850. It was an outstanding work and H.B. Wheatley based his London Past and Present on it in ...”

“... port. Some of his delicacies are listed by Rosamond Richardson, who regards fat hen (alias white goosefoot, alias dirty dick, alias pigweed, alias mutton tops) as ‘the most enlightening discovery of all my forays into the hedgerows’. It is full of protein, distinguished in flavour and one can bring it home by the armful: in short, ‘a sensational ...”

“... the horrors of the inter-war years. One good example of this genre is the trilogy written by Hans Peter Richter: Friedrich, I was there and The Time of the Young Soldiers. Here, little is spared the reader by way of scenes depicting Jew-baiting, political thuggery and human degradation. With a past like this, it is not surprising that German writers do not ...”

“... National Servicemen in their time. With Nexus, Virgin Publishing inherited a couple of editors, Peter Darvill-Evans and Kerri Sharp, who had the wit to see that there was an untapped market for ‘erotic fiction written by women for women’ – Femporn. Since John Cleland, men have written pornography for men under female pseudonyms: a tradition which had ...”

“... the pub-going tart with a heart, ‘cocking her hat at a better angle in a mirror which advertised White Horse’. All this was probably a complete waste of time. The Guardian had talked of Christopher having a girl, and said the police wanted to contact her. ‘They have still not spoken to a girlfriend he was believed to have had in Blackpool.’ On the ...”