“... In​ 1974, aged 71, having announced the end of a writing career that had produced nearly two hundred novels, and having retreated from a mansion with 11 servants to a small house in Lausanne where he lived with his second wife’s ex-maid, Georges Simenon dictated his Letter to My Mother, Henriette Simenon née Brüll, who had died four years earlier ...”

“... back to back. In mainstream cinema, performers mainly ‘go about feigning genuine humanity’, as David Foster Wallace wrote in his marvellous essay on pornography, ‘Big Red Son’. In porn, however, defences sometimes slip, and what Wallace has a porn fan characterise as the ‘what-do-you-call … human-ness’ of a person is allowed to shine ...”

“... Battleship, the horse that had won that year’s Grand National. The Cliveden set was ridiculed in Reynolds News as a kind of upper-class pro-Hitler cabal. It was felt that the house was becoming a second, covert Foreign Office, with the expertise of civil servants being trounced by cocktail party consensus. ‘For 18 months,’ the paper reported, ‘Cliveden ...”

“... Parkway. They were old established colourists and had in the window a palette board used by Joshua Reynolds. Whatever happened to that? Further to the painting, though, for which I scorn to don the Marigolds, I am buying bread in Villandry when I see the assistant gazing in horror at my hands, the fingers stained the virulent yellowish green I’ve been ...”

“... into an integrated narrative history of his country. Perhaps incredulous of such ambition, Sian Reynolds has taken the liberty of suppressing the full extent of it in her graceful English translation.What were the aims of this vast design? Braudel’s previous themes were virtually invented by him – strikingly original quarries from the past little mined ...”

“... weight was crushing even for the very finest of its mandarins. The senior Foreign Office official, David Gore-Booth, agreed that answers ‘should be accurate’ but thought that ‘half a picture can be accurate.’ Similarly, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, thought that it was ‘acceptable in some circumstances for a statement to disclose only part ...”

“... it back to the studio bosses. When Garland became pregnant by her first husband, a musician called David Rose, the studio encouraged her to have an abortion: a baby would have ruined her image as a girlish ingénue.Garland felt the oppression of being an eternal teenager so keenly that she didn’t immediately welcome Meet Me in St Louis when discussions about ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”