“... landing for the hornets tricky). 1 August. A propos Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat the pistol, therefore are essentially unscrupulous and unreliable.’ 30 August. A commercial for Carte D’Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have ...”

“... mime of activity, its sirens and flashing lights, was organised like the final, formulaic act of a James Bond movie. Another mad scheme for world domination revealed. Another doomsday weapon defused. Bond movies, up to now, were way beyond North Greenwich’s ambitions. The old gasworks had featured in the odd episode of Dr Who and even, curiously, as the set ...”

“... In the spring of 1930, 16 years into his service in the Chinese Maritime Customs, my father, James Anderson, was posted to Hong Kong. He remained there two years, technically posted to Kowloon, but living on the Peak. He disliked the place. The setting might be ‘carelessly beautiful’, but the society was dreary and the town repellent. ‘It is ...”

“... Manley Hopkins and John Millington Synge, whose work he would defend vehemently; he met the young James Joyce, who declared him ‘very loquacious’. If Yeats liked someone, he made a sketch of them or even a portrait. He was not too bothered if they did not pay. ‘I painted for nothing when I could not get the money,’ he said years later. ‘In Dublin ...”

“... the ‘solitary spinster’, which provoked the ire of later feminist critics such as Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith. ‘The most marketable image of Dickinson the poet,’ they wrote in Open Me Carefully (1998), ‘was that of the eccentric, reclusive, asexual woman in white.’ But it’s equally true that Dickinson played that role well enough when ...”