“... Vesuvius​ is the only active volcano on mainland Europe and perhaps the most famous in the world. Its most recent eruption was in 1944, the latest in a series of eruptions that began in 1660. By 1737, which saw the sixth of them, it was apparent to a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Naples, who had seen the ‘inextinguishable fires’, that Vesuvius afforded ‘ample matter for reflection and writing’ and for ‘modern philosophers a sufficient subject to employ their thoughts ...”

“... a patron of the Terrence Higgins Trust and helped to set up the London Lighthouse in Notting Hill, the first centre and hospice for Aids patients, three years before, as Glenconner puts it, Princess Diana arrived ‘with a posse of photographers in tow’.By then, however, Margaret’s own health was in decline. She had a series of strokes and by the end ...”

“... What were you like as a child?’ Dick Cavett asked Edward Gorey on his talk show in November 1977. ‘Small,’ he replied. Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, did not like to talk about himself or his work, which depended, like the Japanese literature he admired, ‘very much [on] what is left out’. Someone who thought of himself principally as a writer, but is now remembered chiefly as an artist and illustrator of his own and other people’s work, Gorey created a peculiar, hermetic world in which the comic and the macabre combine in proportions dependent on the reader’s temperament ...”

“... Joseph Johnson​ was fourteen when he arrived in London from Everton, Lancashire in 1753. He came to be apprenticed to George Keith, a bookseller in Gracechurch Street in the City. This was Hogarth’s London, a scene of dirty streets and dark alleys in which impressionable young people were met off the coach by an expectant crowd of brothel keepers, cutpurses and card sharps ...”

“... A marriage​ that makes a good end to a comedy will often make as good a beginning to a tragedy. If any couple bore out that maxim it was Annabella Milbanke and George Gordon Byron. The ‘happy’ chapter lasted barely 24 hours, the ‘ever after’ is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s appreciation ...”

“... Well,’​ said the heavily bandaged Countess of Lucan from her hospital bed, eyeing her sister and brother-in-law with no great affection, ‘now who’s the one with paranoia eh?’ Forty years after the murder of the Lucans’ nanny, Sandra Rivett, the answer is pretty much everybody. The events of the night of 7 November 1974, when Rivett was bludgeoned to death in the basement of the Lucans’ London house, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, the countess was violently assaulted and her husband, John Bingham, seventh earl of Lucan, disappeared, offer all things to all tastes ...”

“... I met​ Steven Runciman several times towards the end of his long life. On one occasion he told me, as he told many people, that as a young man he had danced with a friend of his mother who, in her own youth, had danced with Prince Albert. He seemed slightly disconcerted when I insisted that he dance a few steps with me so that I could say I had danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince Consort, but he did it and our little turn round the room made me feel in some psychic way closer to the court of Queen Victoria ...”

“... On​ National Service in Cyprus in 1958, Auberon Waugh, having ‘miraculously’ become an officer, was sent out with his troop to cover the Nicosia-Kyrenia road between the Turkish village of Guenyeli and the Greek village of Autokoi. This was during the civil war at the time known as the Cyprus Emergency, and the aim of the mission was to prevent either village taking reprisals against the other ...”

“... For​ the wit, Whig and clergyman Sydney Smith it was ‘the golden parallelogram’. The area bounded by Hyde Park to the west and Regent Street to the east, extending north to Oxford Street and south to Piccadilly, enclosed ‘more intelligence and ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world had ever collected in such a space before ...”

“... There has been​ more than one revival of interest in the mayfly career of Pauline Boty since her death in 1966 at the age of 28. In accordance with Cecil Beaton’s dictum that it takes slightly longer than 25 years for a cycle of taste to complete and for the merely dated to become historic, it was in 1993 that the Barbican put on The Sixties Art Scene in London, which featured several of her paintings ...”

“... I’m  most frightfully sorry but it’s the fucking awful weather!’ It was the monsoon season of 1944 and Noël Coward was flat on his face in the mud in the Burmese jungle. He was there to lift morale and raise funds for the 14th army, which was engaged in a brutal struggle against the Japanese. Known as the ‘forgotten army’, its predicament was all but ignored by the British press ...”

“... But you’ve killed me!’ Barbara Comyns’s daughter, Caroline, recognised her younger self in Fanny, the little girl who dies of scarlet fever in Comyns’s second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. ‘Poor, beautiful little Fanny! her life had been wasted because of stupidity and poverty.’ On its first publication in 1950, when Caroline was fifteen, Comyns insisted on the insertion of a qualifying sentence at the beginning to the effect that ‘the only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters Ten, Eleven and Twelve and the poverty ...”

“... was almost as much paper as structure. Horace Walpole used to joke that his villa at Strawberry Hill, the first important Gothic house, was a paper toy (which was literally true in so far as the ‘battlements’ were made of papier-mâché), but more importantly it was the stuff of literature, the setting for Walpole’s Otranto, the first Gothic ...”

“... In the summer of 1771 William Constable had just returned to Burton Constable, his house in the East Riding of Yorkshire, after a lavish Grand Tour. He and his sister Winifred had spent £7000 and came home laden with pictures, sculptures, books and miscellaneous antiquities. Constable now regarded himself as a connoisseur or, as he put it, ‘a bit of a Vertu ...”

“... Harold Stanley Ede​ , who was known for most of his life as Jim, lived through nearly the whole of the 20th century. Born in 1895, he died in 1990, having, as his modest epitaph in St Peter’s church in Cambridge puts it, ‘created Kettle’s Yard and helped to preserve this church’. Kettle’s Yard, the house and gallery that still holds Ede’s collection of 20th-century art, as well as hosting exhibitions and concerts, is the place where generations of undergraduates, including me and, somewhat later, Laura Freeman, first encountered the work of Miró and David Jones, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Gaudier-Brzeska and others ...”