“... to ask if I was the young person referred to in Dalton’s account of a Sunday lunch party at Harry Walston’s house at Newton in the early Fifties. Oh yes, I said brightly, and prattled on for several minutes about the pink champagne, the eclectic company (the unsinkable Woodrow Wyatt still Keeping Left in those days), Dalton’s booming political ...”

“... a Thief. But he had gone too far: in Monaco, while making To Catch a Thief, Kelly was noticed by a prince. The magic of actress and beholder really could work – but not for the master. That made a mortifying English joke. Hitch wanted Grace still. For years he tried to tempt her with projects, even as late as Marnie in 1964. But the protocols of the court of ...”

“... a struggle to the death. After the Communist leaders Govan Mbeki (Thabo Mbeki’s father) and Harry Gwala were released from jail, in 1987 and 1988 respectively, Ramaphosa became an intimate of theirs, and when Kgalema Motlanthe too was released he gave him a union sinecure. He even provided Gwala, a self-described Stalinist and one of the most ...”

“... Cimmie’s death in 1933, her other sister, ‘Baba Blackshirt’ Metcalfe, who was married to the Prince of Wales’s equerry, ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe. Poor Fruity was a faithful member of the British Fascisti and had to put up with being cuckolded not only by Mosley but by Count Grandi, Mussolini’s man in London. Somehow Mosley managed to make his adoring ...”

“... July. A book review in the LRB by Jonathan Coe of The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson edited by Harry Mount kicks off with some remarks about the so-called satire boom of the early 1960s. It recalls John Bird’s The Last Laugh, the Cambridge Footlights revue of 1959 (which I saw) and while recognising that it was too radical to be very funny, claims ‘it ...”

“... adult, when I learned that the slipper was not of verre, but of vair: which is to say, ermine. The prince and his agents were ranging the kingdom with a tiny female organ in hand, his ideal bride in miniature. Never mind her face: he had not raised his eyes so far. All he knew was that the fit was tight.Three, four, I am still four: I think I will be it for ...”

“... Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.’ Harry Furniss wrote that ‘Lady Wilde, had she been cleaned up and plainly and rationally dressed, would have made a remarkably fine model of the Grand Dame, but with all her paint and tinsel and tawdry tragedy-queen get-up she was a walking burlesque of ...”

“... on the character of the hoaxer and the trickster – Cagliostro, Cesare Borgia, the Great Orsino, Harry Lime, Mr Arkadin, Hank Quinlan. Quite often he is a magician, on screen as well as off. In F for Fake, he provides both critique and demonstration of forgery in action, the nature of illusion, the twinning of lies and truth, the original and the copy. He ...”

“... Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie Jacques, not to mention the pre-teen Julie Andrews – without ever being upstaged. In performance he would always hit the spot. The secret of his extraordinary popularity was his voice. His high-pitched giggles ...”

“... my cut-glass maternal grandmother as the ‘Fast World War’), a very messy affair which had made Harry Clack’s lungs turn green. Harry worked in the potting sheds of my mother’s ancestral home and hacked up an eternal spew of mustard-gas phlegm. This got him out of going to the second war, which was a replay of the ...”

“... like ‘The Blue from Heaven’, ‘Fafnir and the Knights’, ‘The Frozen Lake’, ‘The Frog Prince’ and ‘The Ass’: the strange stateliness of their pacing, their weird combinations of the wishful and the inexorable, need time to work their effects. Smith’s reputation as a quirky miniaturist often preceded her; like others before and ...”

“... Union flag mask, Park View recently hosted a visit from the Royal College of Defence Studies and a Harry Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school ...”

“... a concert in Stockholm on 12 June, in the presence of the queens of Sweden and England, as well as Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and members of the Swedish royal family. Sargent was in his element, the concert was a triumph, and he received a great ovation. But Sargent’s greatest and most sustained efforts went into the Promenade Concerts, where he ...”

“... were reconfirmed. Two hundred years after ‘Rule Britannia’ was first performed before the Prince of Wales, Britain once again, in the summer of 1940, proved itself the patron of liberty. New Whig histories (Churchill, Trevelyan) which upheld the myth of Britain’s distinctive tradition of freedom and equipoise sold by the hundred thousand. Orwell, in ...”

“... the obituary, Sam had had a late flowering and that in his nineties he had figured in one of the Harry Potter films. The obituary written by Nicholas de Jongh.14 July. I am reading as a bedside book The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. Simply an account of the customers and the (sometimes meagre) takings of a bookshop in Wigtown in Scotland, it’s ...”