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“... than a million, at the age of 91. And the oldest person in Britain was also among the richest. Elizabeth Ramsden died in 1817, worth £140,000, at the age of 106. The average age at death of the whole adult population was probably 50 at most. In Britain 200 years ago, the more you got the longer you lived; and the longer you lived the more you got. This ...”

“... wisdom of the ages together with her top-class legal education and opted for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s considered definition of obscenity: ‘I know it when I see it.’ Back to the Twelve Personal Commandments. The first, it has to be said, is difficult: ‘Be Gretchen’. I can see the sense in that as things stand, but being Gretchen is ...”

“... to live among the poor, in his own words, ‘as a man longs for his wedding day’. Beatrice Potter and Charles Booth figure, but more as urban explorers and dabblers in cross-class masquerade than as sociological researchers. Toynbee Hall’s ubiquitous Samuel and Henrietta Barnett show up, but their sexually conflicted acolyte, C.R. Ashbee, quickly ...”

“... into gold, using the fabled philosopher’s stone: an idea picked up by J. K. Rowling for Harry Potter. Other literary outings are more cynical, and so closer to reality. In Chaucer’s Canon Yeoman’s Tale, the yeoman is poor because his master, a practitioner of ‘that slippery science’, is poor. His tale concerns another canon, who with ‘sleights ...”

“... on Havana cigars. Feminist art historians have often found her exasperating. As in the case of Elizabeth Butler, the pre-eminent battle painter of Victorian Britain, Bonheur’s subjects don’t easily lend themselves to gendered analysis. Linda Nochlin deplored Bonheur’s indecision in both asserting and shunning her femininity (Nochlin called it ...”

“... Diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George ...”

“... empty Leeds and the train to King’s Cross. 10 September. Watch some of a programme about Dennis Potter, but the assumptions it makes about the relationship between art and life are so naive and wide-eyed and scarcely above the tabloid level that I don’t persist. It takes Potter at his own self-valuation (always ...”

“... my heroines appeared on the back page of the comic I read then, called Girl: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie mingled with Albert Schweitzer and Davy Crockett; their stirring words were blazoned in balloons, against backdrops of crenellated castles, jungles, battlefields. In the pages of the magazines my mother took, I ...”

“... sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours ...”

“... There were many who hoped for a similar meeting of minds by saying they were reading Harry Potter, but to this the Queen (who had no time for fantasy) invariably said briskly, ‘Yes. One is saving that for a rainy day,’ and passed swiftly on. Seeing her almost daily meant that Sir Kevin was able to nag the Queen about what was now almost an ...”