“... One of the mysteries of our time is the hunger we have to know details about the lives of people we have never met. Years ago, walking down Heath Street, I saw, at the bottom of the hill by the station, the most extraordinary glow in the air. I was still too far away to see what was causing the strange disturbance, but as I got closer the picture resolved itself into two figures encased in a golden shimmer, the light zinging around them ...”

“... I could have left well alone; read the new autobiography and a novel or two and got stuck in. I’m not a great believer in the principle that talking to people is the best way of finding out who they really are. I’m not sure I’m even a great believer in the notion that there is a who-they-really-are to be found out. So why I petitioned for an interview with Barbara Cartland still baffles me, except perhaps that I enjoy improbability and (occasionally) being in situations that are entirely beyond my ken ...”

“... As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass audience ...”

“... It’s most likely that I first came across the idea of Humphrey Bogart not in a Bogart movie, but in A bout de souffle. Not in 1960, when it came out – I was more likely to have seen Spartacus then – but three or four years later, when the Godard movie was shown again (and again) at the Academy cinema on Oxford Street, the Hampstead Everyman or the NFT, while I was hoovering up the backlist of the Nouvelle Vague ...”

“... Christena Nippert-Eng loves the beach in spite of the noise, the bugs, the pebbles, the filth and the fact that her dermatologist insists she wear factor-60 sunscreen from April to October. It’s a nexus thing for her and she is quite lyrical about it. The beach is a place where all manner of stuff comes together, juxtaposed ‘in the most enchanting of ways … Creatures that walk, creatures that fly and creatures that swim intermingle here, scaring, fascinating, feeding and amusing each other ...”

“... Academics: beware of loving what you write about. Fandom can tempt intellectuals to take uncharacteristic risks with their primary sources. Even Stanley Fish, who as the author of Is There a Text In This Class? knows better than anyone how important the division of insider and outsider is for keeping amateurs at bay. In 1993, Fish-the-fan, enamoured of the American television series The Fugitive, joined the faithful at a convention in Hollywood to rerun, adore and discuss the episodes, to listen to actors and directors of the programme talk about their experience ...”

“... In some Eastern mystical traditions there is a route to enlightenment called ‘the Path of Blame’. The idea is to abandon any outward or inward claim to superiority, to disdain the admiration of the world and discard visible social niceties – even, or especially, if it means appearing to deserve the contempt of others. Explaining the way of the disciple taking the Path of Blame, Patrick Laude (a professor at Georgetown University and writer on Sufism) suggests that a typical malamati would eagerly confess along with Hamlet: ‘I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me ...”

“... Not long ago a friend of mine was walking back to her car after the cinema when, not unusually for the time and the place, a distraught man placed himself in her way. She was not frightened; he was easily identified as mad, not bad. A shuffling walk, a drooping, defeated posture which required a special effort to raise his head so he could address her, and eyes, when they lifted, which were more distressed than aggressive ...”

“... Snow is cold. Some more information I am prepared to accept as plain fact: near 90° South if you take your gloves off for more than a few moments, your fingers die; at its edge, the 5.5 million square mile ice-cap (twice that size in winter) calves bergs, some as big as London, the largest recorded 60 miles long, which drift through the most turbulent seas in the world; no land-based vertebrate inhabits the southernmost continent, because nothing can live on it apart from breeding penguins and seals; the seas freeze into great shifting platelets of ice which can crush to toothpicks a ship caught in their grip ...”

“... Once, the mad were exhibited at Bedlam for the fascination of Sunday tourists; ooh’ed and ahh’ed at as examples of how the human mind can distort the civilised and rational behaviour which was supposed to be its very particular accomplishment. Lately, they are more freely available between the covers of books, described and philosophised over by neurologists, psychiatrists and therapists who, besides seeking to cure them, wish to illuminate the meaning of their mad patients for the general – as in normal – public ...”

“... The problem with Nancy Mitford, according to one of her sisters (the Communist? Possibly. The troublesome, giggly one who fancied Hitler? Not likely. The Duchess? Probably), is that she never came first with anyone. It’s doubtful if coming first is part of the human birth right, but it feels as if it is, both to those who do come first with someone, and those who don’t ...”

“... Herman Kruk was a man of 42 and the director of the Yiddishist Grosser Library at the Cultural League in Warsaw when war broke out and he, along with other Jewish men who were in danger of being snatched off the streets, fled the city. After a month of wandering, hiding and failing to escape to the East, he arrived in Vilna, then under Lithuanian control, along with twenty thousand other Jewish refugees from Poland ...”

“... I think it is two years since I’ve been to the cinema. This is something of a mystery to me, like love gone wrong: in fact, it is love gone wrong. Was the love misguided in the first place, have I simply aged out of the way of love, or has the beloved altered beyond all recognition? Naturally, lovers whose love is depleted are inclined to think the last: it makes them feel better, less fickle, less hopeless, that the loss is not their own fault ...”

“... Whatever the truth of the appealing though dubious proposition that by forty everyone has the face they deserve, it looks as if getting the biographer you deserve post-mortem is pretty much pot luck. Here are two beautiful, displaced, canny women with a powerful sense of their own purpose. For Stacy Schiff, the Véra Nabokov she introduces is ‘the figure in the carpet ...”

“... I find myself nostalgic for the time, long ago, when one thing the very rich and very famous could be relied on to do was shut up. Paul Getty, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Grace of Monaco wrapped their money around themselves in the form of impenetrable walls and/or designer sunglasses and kept silent while the world wondered and chattered. And you would imagine that if money could do anything for you it would be to insulate you from having to care what other people thought ...”