“... or may not have been Albert Carstairs, a Scottish army officer who disappeared before her birth in London. Her volatile, oil heiress mother – subsequently a heroin addict and dabbler in bizarre rejuvenation therapies – seems not to have paid much attention to the odd little homunculus to whom she had given birth. (‘I was never a little girl,’ Carstairs ...”

“... York to be a ‘giant snake pit’, Los Angeles to be ‘quel hole’. Naples was ‘crooked’, London ‘a dreary place’. Even Paris, ‘a divine city’, could be ‘colder than a nun’s cunt’. Once he had passed the quarter century he hit on Rome: ‘a beautiful city, really – though inhabited by a quarrelsome and cynical race’. From Taormina in ...”

“... In the first volume of the series, Master and Commander, he meets up with a young Naval officer, Jack Aubrey, when the two discover a mutual passion for Boccherini, and a pleasure in playing him together on violin and viola. The partnership continues throughout the series, with Jack captaining sloops, frigates and other ...”

“... Louvre. Paris is generous to people finding their way round with maps. Here (as is not the case in London) street names are abundant. You can find them at almost any junction. Later, looking on the internet for something about the form the signs take, I came upon an electronic magazine, Ruavista: Signs of the City, in which the street as museum is celebrated ...”

“... motive for his writing, as his widow, Janice Tidwell, astutely observes in her introduction to The London Lover: My Weekend that Lasted Thirty Years. Growing up on the wrong side of the Chicago tracks at the beginning of the Depression, the bastard child of two Russian-born union organisers, Clancy had early exposure to the rough and tumble of American ...”

“... Shortly after the Sunday Times’s enforced move into the London Docklands, David Blundy and Jon Swain were strolling towards the new production plant’s heavily-guarded entrance. These two foreign correspondents are used to witnessing military activity (you may remember Swain as a character in Roland Joffe’s movie, The Killing Fields), but they were astonished to see an armoured car with a full complement of Royal Marines apparently patrolling inside the heavily-fortified perimeter fence ...”

“... books, Doing the Business, contained the helpful observation that the only Robin Hoods in East London were pubs and he brings the same sardonic approach to this account of ne’er-do-wells and worse. He opens with perhaps the most inviting come-on line of any recent book about crime: ‘The idea for this book began when several people informed me that my ...”

“... of the World War, Magnus Hirshfeld, ‘a Jewish physician with literary interests’, refers to London’s ‘orgiastic outgrowths’, its nudist clubs and ‘playgrounds for narcotic addicts’. Opium, heroin and cocaine were available over chemists’ counters: newspapers were aghast at the antics of ‘Snow Snifters’. Much later, dining with pop stars ...”

“... about sex and pain, but the theme is certainly present in McQueen’s work, from the notorious ‘Jack the Ripper’ student show to ‘It’s Only a Game’ (2005) to the bondage allusions (horses’ bits, braces, straps, harnesses, hoods, masks and piercings). McQueen himself made a series of comments about women which have the candour that won him many ...”

“... got a legit website, great reviews. The girls Skype with Mark Price, a handsome man in a busy London office, and he arranges their transport. Except there is, we soon learn, no Mark Price, the website and testimonials are fake, the busy office is just a clever camera angle and a sound recording, and the girls are on their way to sex ...”

“... cater for young men any more, unless they’re transvestites or slaves. Blokes under forty are all Jack-my-lads who think their pricks are bloody priceless.’ The types who went to her in Streatham all had one reason or another to feel out of the mainstream of sexual conduct. Even those who didn’t want a beating would probably not have had the cheek to turn ...”

“... from Niger was false – based, it turned out, on forged documents passed on to Washington and London by the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI? How did it happen that the intelligence services of the US and the UK got the story of Iraq’s WMD so badly wrong? Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo provide some clues in three articles in La ...”

“... Children’s Home, on the doorstep of her digs on Highbury Fields. It is 1944. Philip is living in London, dodging the flying bombs, occasionally visiting Emma (a motherly soul who makes no demands on him), working as an office boy, writing poetry. He finds a better job with Eric Sly, a court reporter who has a dingy office in one of the cells beneath ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd ...”

“... collaborators, a conspiracy of the unheard, and with one man in particular, the sharp-witted London activist Stewart Home.Home, in stark contrast to the brothers on the Celtic fringe, was a dynamo of invention, recycling Dadaist provocation into fugues of inspired counter-terror, then moving on. A suspicion lingers in the scorch marks that Home’s major ...”