“... as an usherette in the theatre and thus (I hope) scandalising that Trollopean place.17 September. Edward Albee dies. We met once, I think in 1972, when we were seated at the same table at the Evening Standard awards lunch. I was struck by how stylish and Ivy League he was (like Woody Allen, who wore similarly dapper outfits then), slim and neat in a look I ...”

“... of nuclear energy or Mr Scargill’s dirty, polluting, nasty piece of coal?’ ‘When I was a young man working down the pit,’ Scargill replied, ‘I occasionally suffered from dyspepsia and heartburn. I relieved the symptoms by sucking on a piece of coal, as it is a good antacid. I will eat this dirty lump of coal if this gentleman will eat his uranium ...”

“... Debutante’, conjures up the atmosphere of paternal tyranny and filial insubordination. Its young heroine, Lucretia, likes to play with her rocking horse, Tartar, even though her father (‘the bastard’) has forbidden it; when he catches her, he throws Tartar into the fire, producing ‘the most frightful neighing … as if an animal were suffering ...”

“... correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps some of it was, but evidently much remains. I expressed the hope in the preface to my own book that one day ‘some wealthy foundation will finance a complete edition of the correspondence of the best letter-writer among all English ...”

“... If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English … If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog … But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real ...”

“... musical comedy is manifest. He is sure-footed where before he had floundered. The moment when the young widow and her landowner-creditor aim duelling pistols at each other has far more erotic charge than anything in Troilus, even its orchestral mimicry of copulation in Act Two. The Bear was well received by critics in the mid-1960s when Walton’s style could ...”

“... on that age-old congeniality of feeling and purpose which brings writers, and particularly young ones, together. A cold wind blows through the world of the arts, where supply is eternally in excess of demand, and one finds shelter where one may. Nor am I recommending any variety of Noble Savagery or Doing-your-own-thing. The latter is a contemporary ...”

“... myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently genial beak, well looked on by the boys. We met only in his last few years at a dining-club mentioned in the Letters, when at table he was always a most agreeable neighbour. A story told me years ago by Sacheverell Sitwell ...”

“... and friendship loyalties, and wholly negative. The case always cited was that of Pavlik Morozov, a Young Pioneer who denounced his own father during collectivisation, whose example was recommended to generations of Soviet children.*In the course of my research on Soviet history, I became interested in Stalin’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s and early ...”

“... wittily indecorous. When, on a fishing trip with Nathanael West and S.J. Perelman, the writer Edward Paramore, a popular ladies’ man, hooked what Sayre’s father, Joel, described to her in a letter as an ‘eerie Will-Beebish object’, purplish and fronded. Perelman identified it as ‘a marine vulva’. As for the ‘athletic, activist’ drinking ...”

“... theory that creativity will flow if outside pressures are removed seems to work. Time is what the young need, and contact with their contemporaries as much as with great minds – which is just as well, because you have to have something pretty important to say to dare disturb one of the world’s great brains when it is thinking about the world’s deepest ...”

“... Seventy-four at the time, and three years from death, he probably said it to annoy the serious young dons in the serious new English departments, and he certainly succeeded. It pleased him not only to be a voice from the past, but a voice of almost youthful irresponsibility, dissent, blasphemy, iconoclasm. And it pleased him no doubt to dis-identify ...”

“... which he took to, thanks to Chinatown, the opaque glamour of whose cultural life was just what the young doctor would have ordered for himself – how right that the apprentice Exote should first have been turned in a sinological direction by the sight of Chinese life in its export version. In May 1903, Gauguin died, and three months later, Segalen’s ship ...”

“... whose teenage years had been overshadowed by the First World War. ‘We strain every nerve to keep young,’ Nicky says. ‘We’re all so hectic and nervy.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ his fiancée replies. ‘It probably only means we shan’t live so long.’ The dialogue sets the underlying terrors bouncing off a brightly flippant surface, making no ...”

“... sightline of two passing nuns. But it’s all quite gloomy and solitary, as if she’s stuck in an Edward Hopper painting. The effect of reading about the lady is strange; you’re struck by the poignancy of your own mundane rituals, as if, all of a sudden, you were drunk. Brennan wanted to write ‘as though the camera had never been invented’. She’s a ...”