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In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s hapless teenage diarist, reeling from the news that Argentina has just occupied the Falkland Islands, fails to locate the archipelago on his world map. Eventually, his mother comes to the rescue and discovers it ‘hidden under a crumb of fruitcake’. If general awareness of the Falklands before 1982 was somewhat limited, as Townsend slyly implied, it pales into complete insignificance in comparison with the all-but-forgotten former British territory of Providence. This is a place I have to confess to never having heard of before picking up The Island that Disappeared. My ignorance is one thing and, according to Tom Feiling, common enough.

Some 30 summers ago we were staying at a famously beautiful villa outside Turin; our hostess was — indeed is — renowned for her superb taste and distilled perfection of every aspect of douceur de vivre. Each night we dined in a different sylvan setting — under inky trees, in flower-filled gardens and in 18th-century rococo salons, amid porcelain bouquets of those selfsame flowers. Another room, with candles lighting the chinoiserie panelling, is forever incised in my mind, not only for the decor but for the last course.

In his biography of Gaudí, published in 2001, Gijs van Hensbergen opined that ‘we should never try to finish the Sagrada Família, otherwise we undo the web of power that is elaborately woven into this mysterious religious spell’. But he now appears to take the view that it should, and will, be finished by 2026, the centenary of Gaudí’s death (though the sculpted decoration will take considerably longer to complete). If indeed this extraordinary building is ‘topped out’ in nine years’ time, it will have taken 144 years to build, which is a good deal less than many medieval cathedrals (Toledo’s took more than 250 years).

In 2015 a pair of linen drawers belonging to Queen Victoria sold at auction for over £12,000. In old age Queen Victoria swathed herself in wraps and loose gowns which artfully concealed her figure, and her official photographers were ordered to photoshop her outline. But these knickers with their 45” waistband make plain that the 5’-queen was borderline obese. Annie Gray has written a culinary biography of Queen Victoria which tells us what she ate. Breakfast was a hearty meal, often featuring lamb chops. For dinner Victoria ate rich French food, and her menus were always written in French. No plain Mrs Beeton-style cooking for the queen. Dinner began with a choice of soups.

I once spent an evening, back in the mid-1980s, with William Colby, the legendary spy and director of the CIA. I was an undergraduate at the time, and the CIA’s Iran–Contra debacle was in the news. Lured by the agency’s mystique, I was eager to ask him about the fabled Phoenix programme he directed — a top secret initiative to target and eliminate Viet Cong who had infiltrated South Vietnamese villages, often conducted by Americans who had crossed over some invisible line, leaving behind them the normal life that comprised my world. To my disappointment, Colby demystified Phoenix. He was very proud of the programme, and while he never said so, I distinctly remember feeling convinced by him that the CIA should have run the whole war in Vietnam.

I once asked Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, what she did to relax. Nailing me to the wall with her no-nonsense look, she said: ‘I keep sheep.’ A similar association with the animal kingdom resounds through Henry Hemming’s excellent new life of Maxwell Knight, the famous spymaster and possible archetype for Ian Fleming’s ‘M’. Knight’s family and friends observed that, at an early age, he had a particular way with animals that allowed him to bring them under his spell. As a young man he kept a menagerie in his small London flat consisting of a bulldog, a bear and a baboon.