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Suzanne er Annas intellektuelle alibi. Fra samme strøk, men aldri en del av gjengen. Da Anna og venninnene begynte å drikke og suge pikk satt Suzanne hjemme og leste Jane Austen.

“This is an unreal place,” [Abraham] Pais wrote in his diary in February 1948. “Bohr comes into my office to talk, I look out the window and see Einstein walking home with his assistant. Two offices away sits Dirac. Downstairs sits Oppenheimer....” It [Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton] was a concentration of scientific talent like no other in the world... except, of course, Los Alamos.

«Kræbs er meget fülsomme», har Keiseren sagt. «De schammer sich düpt når de blir kokt. Det kan man se på rødmen.»

Because his legs were all gone to hell he disported himself about town by means of two second-hand crutches. These exertions caused him to sweat and smell a fair amount, enough, at any rate, to earn him the nickname of Mobile Armpit.

I had a bedsit on the Warwick Road in Earl’s Court and Marc [Almond] had one on the next floor up, and Madonna needed somewhere to stay, so she crashed at Marc’s bedsit and we used to have breakfast together every morning. She was great—she was just like us. She used to come up to Some Bizzare all the time when she was in London, because Warners was just around the corner. [Jane Rolink]

We felt Rough Trade were becoming a different kind of thing and great as they were, it was starting to feel a bit alien to us all. It was all very West London—Scritti Politti, The Raincoats, that kind of thing—and we were electronic and a bit different. And, apart from The Fall, we were the only weird Northern band on the label. Mark E. Smith was like, 'What do you mean everybody has fucking lentils for lunch?' [Stephen ' Mal' Malinder, Cabaret Voltaire]

But what he [Stevo] liked most about Neubauten were the things we considered the least important—aspects of the work that we were trying to steer away from to avoid being pigeonholed as a band who were just about destroying everything. Although we did enjoy destroying things from time to time. He was into sensation and controversy, and always wanted us to play somewhere where we could tear down the whole building and get on the front page of The Sun or something. So, he didn't have a strong artistic understanding of what we were doing, but that didn't really matter. [Mark Chung]

I did appreciate what he [Stevo] was trying to do with Some Bizzare, but I thought of him like a Throbbing Gristle record: I was glad he was around, but I really didn’t want to spend any time with him. [Jessamy Calkin]

Ollie's boyfriend – another trans boy – was also being seen and assessed by GIDS at the same time. This wasn't an uncommon occurrence at the service, and little was made of it. It seemingly wasn't explored why two female-bodied young people might identity as gay men rather than lesbians.

The lack of data stunned some of those who worked in GIDS. They couldn't understand how the service could not provide the data the court had asked for. 'It took the wind out of me,' one senior staff member at the time tells me. And made them furious. The Executive had found time to write papers about 'postmodernist, high-level theoretical ideas and stuff', they explain, but the service was not following up the children and young people it had cared for.

A tourist never came alone; instead, they always appeared as part of a group. Years later, I discovered that the groups were of two kinds: the realists and the dreamers. The dreamers belonged to fringe Marxist-Leninist groups. They mostly came from Scandinavia and were furious with the social wreckage that was called social democracy. They brought sweets to offer locals, who rarely accepted. They worshipped our country as the only one in the world that had managed to build a principled, uncompromising socialist society.

Fantes det ikke noe filtreringssystem? Kan den enkelt låner avgjøre om en bok skal i flammene? – Med sorg å melde, ja, sa Per Bleken. Det er en del av regjeringens utfasing av litteraturen, dette også; en forlengelse av at kulturministeren i 2016 uttalte at det må bli slutt på at noen forteller oss hva som er god og dårlig kultur. Så nå er det folket selv som avgjør.

– Altså, det var jo egentlig en fillesak, og spør du meg, er denne politianmeldelsen for at du har stjålet nitten sjeldne bøker, også en fillesak; likevel kan jeg si deg det rett ut; jeg akter å bruke politianmeldelsen som oppsigelsesgrunn. Ikke for det; du har sannelig gjort mye godt arbeid i løpet av dine år her, uten tvil, arkivet, de ulike samlingene, jo, men du har ikke vært villig til å delta i den nye tid. Bøker er på vei ut. Inn kommer interaktive måte å forholde seg til kulturen på. Spill. Hvem orker å lese om greske helter når man kan spille dem i HD? Hvorfor lese Shakespeare, når man kan kle seg ut, virtuelt, som Julius Cæsar, og befinne seg med hud og hår i Roma, 44 år før Kristus?

A seventeen-year-old boy (I'd be eighteen in March) tooling across Mulholland in a convertible Mercedes dressed in a private-school uniform and wearing Wayfares is an image from a certain moment of empire that I was, at times, self-conscious about—did I look like an asshole? I'd briefly wonder—before thinking: I look so cool I don't care.

And the prince-of-darkness literary persona readers thought I had always embodied was now vanishing, being replaced by something sunnier—the man who wrote American Psycho was actually, some people were surprised to find out, just an amiable mess, maybe even likable, and not nearly the careless nihilist so many people mistook me for, an image that I perhaps played along with anyway.