I would never have to take employment again. I could travel: I had always wanted to do the Grand Tour, like so many poets and artists before me. I could afford a place in town, and somewhere quiet in the country. I would be able to write, freed from domestic worries.

Molly Allen, fearless as ever.

Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.’

to compare the floral bouquet of a Yemeni mocca with ‘the rose-petal vapours of a maiden’s breath’. ‘There is no such aroma, Robert. You only wish it to be so,’

We celebrated the artificial above the natural, the artistic above the practical, and, Oscar Wilde notwithstanding, laid claim to extravagant vices which few of us had any intention of actually indulging.

How easy it was to confuse attention with affection!

J. Walter Thompson.’ Pinker grimaces. ‘Quite why Americans have to put both dates and initials in the wrong order I shall never know.

Brewer was a politician: he had known the best way to make his appeal to me.

he was a type of man for whom love was indistinguishable from his own interests.