“... Queers’ assembling after dusk (they sound like a band from a couple of decades later). Hampstead Heath gets a few mentions, with police agents provocateurs getting up to ludicrous antics, as does the Coleherne in Earls Court, later London’s most famous leather bar, where in 1964 Keith Vaughan finds the pianist playing early Beethoven sonatas and ...”

“... birth, for they gave me a couple of good Jewish names, David and Bernard, but preceded them with Anthony. I was always called Tony. This perhaps went well with the sort of role my mother wanted me to play. When I was eight she said she would like me to have a career like Noël Coward’s; later she suggested that I might become a couturier. My sister was ...”

“... lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.’ ‘I was giving the CH once, I think it was to Anthony Powell, and we were discussing bad behaviour. Notably well-behaved himself and even conventional he remarked that being a writer didn’t excuse one from being a human being. Whereas (one didn’t say this) being Queen does. I have to seem like a human ...”