“... Arthur Saunders Wolff III, aka Saunders Answell-Wolff III, the ‘Duke’ of Tobias’s brother Geoffrey’s memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979). As the memoirs of both Wolff brothers show, the father spent his life shedding past selves and conceiving new ones – as Unitarian, then Episcopalian, as Groton schoolboy, Yale man (in Skull and Bones), Royal ...”

“... burden by imposing a government task force. Not everyone in the new Government was happy, however. Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General, was obliged to resign when it was revealed that Peter Mandelson had borrowed around £400,000 from him to buy a house in Notting Hill. Robinson stayed out in the cold while ...”

“... probably increased the estimate. At one point in 2011 the Merchant Navy War Memorial at Tower Hill was to have been hired out for some bankers’ junket. That a Methodist church in Bournemouth has been bought and reopened as a Tesco is hardly worth mentioning. So what is? Everywhere nowadays has its price and the more inappropriate the setting the ...”

“... about a Burgess fiction brings the comment: ‘This is what British criticism has descended to.’ Geoffrey Grigson’s dislike of his ‘coarse and unattractive personality’ is mentioned, repeated, finally repaid by a feeble satirical sonnet. A look at Grigson on Alvarez would have shown him how it should be done. ‘Coarse and unattractive’: there are ...”

“... a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less ...”

“... was living on £46,000 a year, Mandelson borrowed £373,000 (eight times his MP’s salary) from Geoffrey Robinson, an industrialist Blair put in the Treasury after New Labour’s victory. Robinson’s fortune had been inflated by dealings with Robert Maxwell, the Channel Island tax havens and a legacy from a satirically named Madame Bourgeois, a Belgian ...”

“... and the Rise of Biography (1992), Ian Hamilton quotes Brooke’s Rugby and Cambridge friend Geoffrey Keynes on the underlying causes of the Eddie-Ranee stand-off: Brooke’s unmanly physical beauty was often taken as an indication that he was probably a homosexual … It had, of course, been far from Marsh’s intention to produce any such ...”

“... area – 97 of them – and smaller but still substantial numbers in Dulwich, Sydenham and Forest Hill. There were only three architects in Peckham, and none in Rotherhithe. This is, then, an index of middle-class London before the gentrification of the industrial areas nearer the river. The society’s explanation of the numbers was straightforward. Between ...”

“... was a shabby Victorian cul-de-sac running parallel to the Hammersmith and City Line in Notting Hill. The street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no ...”

“... the name Collodi from his mother’s village, 60 kilometres north of Florence, which stood on a hill lined with olive trees. Today the village is notable mainly for its Pinocchio Park, a collection of bronze statues depicting characters in the book, and its array of shops touting long-nosed wooden dolls. After 1865, when Florence was briefly the political ...”

“... Greenbaum, Dwight Bolinger, P.H. Matthews, Sven Jacobson, M.A.K. Halliday, Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Nelson Francis, Morton Bloomfield, E.L. Epstein, John Lyons, Archibald ...”

“... Mario Puzo have ensured that we are more interested in heavies than light-fingered chaps. Billy Hill and Jack Spot, the Fifties London gang leaders, have both had their memoirs ghosted but few of the big heisters have bequeathed their papers to the nation. This is partly because driving a narrative for 60,000 words can be slightly more demanding than ...”

“... Plato a terrible blow ‘with a feathered verse’, but Aristotle stands ‘firm as a castle on a hill’ for all that Horace, Homer and Virgil can do. In the end Logic tries to arrange a truce, but the effort fails dismally because her messenger, having fatally neglected the study of grammar, cannot speak plainly and never gets to the point. As the ...”

“... fighting for time, wondering what to do with her. Her reply was deeply disturbing. ‘I have, Geoffrey.’ ‘Indeed?’ ‘That’s just what I wanted to talk about.’ The memoirs, of course, will also recall Winterwade’s amatory success. The comic point, clearly, is that of a vanity wounded in long retrospect, and the way Shadbold’s interest in ...”

“... the early years, spiralling out from Reyner and Mary Banham’s Sunday coffee mornings in Primrose Hill, events around the ICA or meals in Chelsea. The friendships of these years set up links for life. Eduardo Paolozzi’s huge figure of Newton dominating the forecourt of the British Library is just one mature offspring of the intertwined circle formed some ...”