“... Write, Speak contains little except interviews; when an answer sounds like an echo in a marble hall, it is because he has repurposed it from Speak, Memory. The sameness is unrelieved – until the late 1960s, when various malpractising journalists begin asking him about hippies, which is pleasant. (‘I feel nothing but contemptuous pity for the illiterate ...”

“... andalou. The audience seemed baffled at the end, and some of its members were angry, unprepared no doubt for what Connolly called the ‘destructive reverence’ of the film. ‘With the impression of having witnessed some infinitely ancient horror, Saturn swallowing his sons, we made our way out into the cold of February 1929, that unique and dazzling ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”

“... trans women to be excluded from women’s changing rooms and loos. It means that trans women have no right to female pronouns. The expectation that I, a non-trans woman, use ‘she’ and ‘her’ for someone who I suspect might be biologically male can operate, Stock says, like ‘cognitive Rohypnol’, slowing down my mental processes and making me more ...”

“... which that election wrought that a fervent believer in public service broadcasting saw and sees no contradiction between that belief and voting Conservative. The change in the perceived role of the public service and the public realm from a patrician enemy of progress to the principal site of its defence has touched many institutions, from the Health ...”

“... the sea. Stevenson looked from the top window and saw his characters out there: Billy Bones, Long John Silver and the emerging cast of Kidnapped. The Channel was busy with the ghosts of real seafarers, such as the smuggler Slippery Rogers, who once came to Bournemouth in a boat rowed by forty men, carrying thirty thousand gallons of Dutch brandy. For ...”

“... where the bomb went off in 1974, and you wonder how many precisely it killed and why there is no memorial, and then try to remember what the bomb had sounded like – nothing much in fact, it was more the silence afterwards – as you sat in the reading room; and there is the more exact memory of the rest of that Friday night in the mad, panicking ...”

“... have hobbies. Jogging, growing roses, chess or rock climbing, cake decoration, model aeroplanes. No. Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided; preferences excluded people. One had no preferences. Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself. And besides, reading wasn’t doing. She ...”

“... beard was felt to be potentially damaging to the studio, but a board meeting concluded they had no power to make him shave. This was the studio and the community in which, little more than a year later, and having taught himself cinema, Welles made Citizen Kane: still revolutionary, still dazzling half a century on. This was the community which, deeply ...”

“... was 56 years old when he left Paris for Sicily in the early summer of 1933. It seems clear he had no intention of ever returning to France. His theatrical extravaganzas, legendary generosity and eccentric lifestyle had consumed the bulk of his colossal fortune. He was addicted to drugs. One morning in his hotel in Palermo he opened a vein in his wrist in the ...”

“... may have been panelling and frescoes in the residences of the Parisian nobility, but there was no stimmung: no sense of interior intimacy about the place. For this we must travel to late 17th-century Kristiana in Norway, where Frederik Jacobsen Brun lives with his wife Marthe. The Bruns have installed smoke-free ...”

“... this year, I came across one essay that felt deeply odd in some not quite human way, but I had no tangible evidence that anything untoward had occurred, so that was that.)It’s because ‘plagiarism’ is taken so seriously in the academy that we hold formal hearings at which the student being accused can challenge the claim or at least outline mitigating ...”

“... kibbutz on the banks of the Susquehannah river in Pennsylvania, where, since there would be no private property and hence no incentive to misbehave, they might confidently look forward to a good life of honest toil, philosophising and poetry. Coleridge, thinking a new word necessary for so innovative a departure in ...”

“... the persons who had invited me; they seemed quite satisfied; they evidently thought that there was no difference between laying a table in play and laying it for an actual meal; for them imaginary life and real life were the same thing.To give a child a doll’s tea set instead of a real one was a ‘careless error’, Montessori thought, a delusion. Children ...”

“... who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame will later come into the same category.The only writer she does read with any regularity, though, has nothing to do with the North at all. This is Beverley Nichols, of whose column in Woman’s Own she is a devoted fan, and ...”