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“... orphan, adopted by his rakish uncle Edward, also a guard at the Glace. They live together in the Lord Nelson Hotel, and get on well enough, despite differences of disposition. Edward likes to womanise, gamble and drink whisky; DeFoe is introverted, shy and given to ironing at times of emotional tension. His troubled love affair with Imogen Linny, a caretaker ...”

“... out of the car to kiss Marie-Jo: at this hour the baby is always being pushed in her pram towards home by the nursemaid. One day Simenon was unable to stop on the narrow road because another car was approaching him, and, minutes later, the baby girl fell into a kind of coma. A doctor was called in at once, and he advised Simenon to pick the baby up and hold ...”

“... as a result of the commitment of commercial banks to countries which could not repay. He quotes Lord Lever, who recently told a large lunch of international bankers in London that he had ‘never been so sumptuously entertained by such a distinguished collection of bankrupts’. The bankers may have laughed, but Sampson thinks Lever meant it. If this is the ...”

“... of reputation, with a talent which a recent reviewer has termed ‘prodigal’. He has returned to home ground for the Coronation street-party (now, it seems, hitched up with Margaret, the farmer’s daughter he played with as a child). But despite the feasting, this is not a prodigal’s return. ‘I mean to go on,’ he says. At the heart of this engrossing ...”

“... too. However layered with rocks and earth the roof, however stocked with freeze-drieds (praise the Lord!), however broad the door, how bullet proof, no matter how much water they have stored, until the radiation count all-clear broadcast (they don’t say how) on radio, when they can, but cautiously, then reappear, death got there before them, though they grow ...”

“... a sub-plot concerning a Mafia-type gangster, and the educated woman whom he marries and keeps at home among his relatives and dependants, before strangling her and burying the body in the back-garden. She hasn’t remained faithful to him: that’s what has brought on his homicidal outbreak. Her lover, Bertrand, is meanwhile obtaining absolution in a ...”

“... But the office itself ennobles.’ Mr Vidal works mostly in Italy, to avoid the fate of stay-at-home American writers, which is alcoholism, but he’s famous just the same, and also very rich, for the American public gives him money too. Amis warns us not ‘to indulge our vulgar delight in American vulgarity’. And to call much of what he reports simply ...”

“... and late in action at Tunis and La Goleta. And en route to this Court with letters from my lord Don Juan and from the Duke of Sessa so that Your Majesty might show him favour he was captured in the galley Sol, he and his brother, who also served Your Majesty in the same campaigns, and they were taken to Algiers, where they spent such heritage as they ...”

“... who was the Deputy-Prime Minister of the Kirghizi Republic. After we had discussed her goats at home, the excellence of her walnuts, and the fact that her district grew the most tasty apricots in the world, she came to the point. Fourteen times, she told me, her fellow tribespeople on the other side of the Afghan border had asked for military help to ...”

“... as a boy. Thesiger’s uncle was Viceroy of India and the family included a general, an admiral, a Lord of Appeal, a High Court judge and a famous actor. As a small boy in Addis Ababa, which reeked excitingly of rancid butter and burning dung, he heard the throb of war drums and saw captive princes being led past in chains, a scene which implanted in him ‘a ...”

“... the island: but this did not indicate that no one other than Lizzie could have been in the Borden home that morning. Taking up the analogy, the defence might even have pointed out that Crusoe’s own inference was scarcely watertight: suppose he had taken off his shoes the previous day to paddle and forgotten all about it? It is certainly striking, as ...”

“... takes a simple, or simple-minded, and by our standards barbaric view of the proceedings: the Lord was testing Abraham, who proved his obedience – that he feared God – by being prepared to sacrifice Isaac. It might appear that God here fails two tests – goodness and omniscience; but then, he moves in a mysterious way.) The most appealing voice in ...”

“... stopped her: but who? She was beholden to nobody, and that was her proudest boast.’ Now, hearing home-going schoolchildren under the window she ‘squeezed her eyes shut and doubled herself over her knotted arms. It was a good sound ... but it hurt her.’ At 40 she has married ‘a kind and comical man for whom, though she was too distracted to express ...”

“... inspecting her: ‘Your sweat, your wrinkle cream – quite useful, Eh?’ To make her feel at home, the goddess addresses her as Elly. The vulgar touch is applied not only to mortals but also to Homer’s beautiful but terrifying goddesses. When Aphrodite rescues Paris she comes ‘waltzing up to it, in oyster silk,/Running her tongue around her ...”

“... of the year’s most notable debutantes, she is being forced to marry – wait for it – a bore, Lord Rufus Ponsonby, who is not just an earl but ‘an earl of the realm’. After that we get a bit of backstory, all about Lady Margaret being best pals with Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter and an abject little snob, plus several pages about ...”