“... all the excitement of a slightly dirty circus tent, without the sawdust and the smells. A dull ring with blockhouses at regular intervals which would in time contain refreshment areas and toilet facilities. There was also a solitary red double-decker bus. (So that’s where they’ve got to, I thought.) We plodded around the circumference, trying to form a ...”

“... and fierce feeling for absolutes. It’s not my wish to load all this onto the author of Lucky Jim. But it does remain interesting that his Booker Prize novel, which might well have been called ‘Home Coming’, Amis chose, after all, to name The Old Devils. Larkin once dropped the pensive remark (concerning, I think, the reviews of The Whitsun ...”

“... for rent in yet another new development. Cubs Path, like Coleridge Road and Swan Drive, has the ring of a whimsical made-up name, coined, perhaps, by the developer’s wife or daughter, and meant, in this case, to conjure life in the wild (it’s off Roosevelt Lane, which leads to Rough Rider Ridge and Bullmoose Run). In fact, Cubs Path is part of an estate ...”

“... detectives originally formed in August 1987 after Douglas Hurd, then Home Secretary, asked Jim Sharples, then Deputy Chief Constable of the Avon and Somerset Force, to investigate new alibi evidence submitted on behalf of Paul Hill. Two years later, as a result of the inquiry into that evidence. Hurd referred the case to the Court of Appeal. It was ...”

“... on 11 Clare Street of Flair Travel, to which I probably owe money; I should pay them, or at least ring them up or email. And then there is Bernardo’s restaurant, closed up now but easy to remember the taste of the scampi, the weekly lunches and the dental hospital around the corner where I was tortured once by a student. Someone told me that they have ...”

“... I liked her and so did my sister. On long walks to Gladstone Park she’d tell me the story of the Ring. It was very exciting, and Hagen seemed the most evil and frightening person ever. Jac and I must have been sad when she left because we were very exacting about her successors. There was one memorable incumbent who arrived one evening to take up her duties ...”

“... a church spire or the top floors of City skyscrapers breaking the surface. Kelp forests choke the ring roads, barnacles crust the Wembley arch, mutant eels writhe in the turbine halls of abandoned power stations.The map is terrifying, extraordinary and untrue. It shows the result of the complete melt of all the world’s ice – both polar icecaps, along with ...”

“... people’s children, he had lived in the block longer than most, so a great many people thought to ring him. ‘Nope,’ he said. His neighbour Christos Fairbairn, a young, powerfully built black man, had called the fire brigade seven times, and for some reason to do with the positioning of his flat in relation to the path of the fire, was able to stay inside ...”