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“... brainless and hearty younger brother, Arthur, could inherit instead. ‘Sainty’ Belchamber has no taste for games, girls or money; in his new introduction to the novel, Edmund White calls him a ‘sissy’, which is about right, though, oddly, Cissy is the name of the pitiless young woman Sainty is trapped into marrying. Sturgis never makes any play on ...”

“... Jazz Age of the 1920s, when Wall Street first went public. He pegs the number of investors then at no more than 14 million, or 13 per cent of the population, but at the time it seemed as though everyone was playing: doctors, plumbers and the women in beauty parlours. The Street shed its moral stigma and became fun; Groucho Marx speculated on the strength of ...”

“... settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the preserve of Palestinian and Marxist writers. Many Palestinians, notably Nur Masalaha, have done ...”

“... years, her personal life, politics (I never knew whether or how she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes. No mention of sport. ‘Anita, what do you think of Ireland’s chances in the Six Nations?’ was not a question that ever came to my lips. I remember her telling me that she had just finished a novel ...”

“... it really doesn’t matter if ITV gets an interview with someone. The important thing is that no one else from the BBC gets it. Given that the BBC’s news programmes, under ever tighter managerial control, increasingly look and sound the same, the only one that has a genuine case for deploying its own correspondents is Radio 1’s Newsbeat, which not ...”

“... Write, Speak contains little except interviews; when an answer sounds like an echo in a marble hall, it is because he has repurposed it from Speak, Memory. The sameness is unrelieved – until the late 1960s, when various malpractising journalists begin asking him about hippies, which is pleasant. (‘I feel nothing but contemptuous pity for the illiterate ...”

“... andalou. The audience seemed baffled at the end, and some of its members were angry, unprepared no doubt for what Connolly called the ‘destructive reverence’ of the film. ‘With the impression of having witnessed some infinitely ancient horror, Saturn swallowing his sons, we made our way out into the cold of February 1929, that unique and dazzling ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”

“... which that election wrought that a fervent believer in public service broadcasting saw and sees no contradiction between that belief and voting Conservative. The change in the perceived role of the public service and the public realm from a patrician enemy of progress to the principal site of its defence has touched many institutions, from the Health ...”

“... the sea. Stevenson looked from the top window and saw his characters out there: Billy Bones, Long John Silver and the emerging cast of Kidnapped. The Channel was busy with the ghosts of real seafarers, such as the smuggler Slippery Rogers, who once came to Bournemouth in a boat rowed by forty men, carrying thirty thousand gallons of Dutch brandy. For ...”

“... where the bomb went off in 1974, and you wonder how many precisely it killed and why there is no memorial, and then try to remember what the bomb had sounded like – nothing much in fact, it was more the silence afterwards – as you sat in the reading room; and there is the more exact memory of the rest of that Friday night in the mad, panicking ...”

“... have hobbies. Jogging, growing roses, chess or rock climbing, cake decoration, model aeroplanes. No. Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided; preferences excluded people. One had no preferences. Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself. And besides, reading wasn’t doing. She ...”

“... beard was felt to be potentially damaging to the studio, but a board meeting concluded they had no power to make him shave. This was the studio and the community in which, little more than a year later, and having taught himself cinema, Welles made Citizen Kane: still revolutionary, still dazzling half a century on. This was the community which, deeply ...”

“... was 56 years old when he left Paris for Sicily in the early summer of 1933. It seems clear he had no intention of ever returning to France. His theatrical extravaganzas, legendary generosity and eccentric lifestyle had consumed the bulk of his colossal fortune. He was addicted to drugs. One morning in his hotel in Palermo he opened a vein in his wrist in the ...”

“... may have been panelling and frescoes in the residences of the Parisian nobility, but there was no stimmung: no sense of interior intimacy about the place. For this we must travel to late 17th-century Kristiana in Norway, where Frederik Jacobsen Brun lives with his wife Marthe. The Bruns have installed smoke-free ...”