“... management do give us more time to suffer the pains and debilities of old age but, as Woody Allen noted, consider the alternative. Still, Porter is on to something important here and the tension between his two narratives – the Exodus narrative of liberation from ignorance and disease, the other its ironic doppelgänger – suffuses his book. The ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to understand his ...”

“... corpses, the story’s climax, how outré in fact the whole thing is. Even in a South African teak wood, not many tramps are killed by lightning-stroke. Killed, moreover, to this degree – to the dehumanising reiteration of the word ‘charcoal’, into which some kind of tragic love-story at last crumbles (‘Both burned to charcoal, you see,’ as Hooper ...”

“... the belt at both Revolucion and Lunes. Before I was an Infante terrible, now I was a babe in the wood. Fidel Castro himself talked to us. Characteristically, he had the last word. Getting rid first of the ever-present Browning 9mm fastened to his belt – making true a metaphor by Goebbels: ‘Every time I hear the word culture, I reach for my ...”

“... is likewise visually transfixing. Later, he would become a popular Bay Area psychic, a friend to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and the experimental filmmaker James Broughton and a prominent gay political activist.) Despite Arthur’s chronic selfishness, Esther appears to have treated him in a generous if not saintly spirit. He ended up extracting quite of ...”

“... quotations: The Ingoldsby Legends, Canon Twells and Captain Newton, Blake, Cowley, Pope, Edgar Allen Poe succeeding one another, without any straining for effect. At the funeral of a brother-in-law some months later, Herbert and Raleigh – in opposite registers, disinflationary and grandiloquent – come to mind with equally natural ease. The erudition ...”

“... also stayed the longest: a thickset, sandy-faced man with heavy tortoiseshell spectacles, called Allen, who had a strong temper, which was known to erupt in the early hours of the morning after my father had kept him waiting at the wheel outside a hotel, or on holidays abroad, when crossing some high Alpine pass between one Central European spa and ...”