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“... novel under a male pseudonym (‘a searing novel of grace under pressure by former sergeant Jack Schaeffer’): I suspect it would be experienced as a radically different work. Buffalo Afternoon chronicles forty-odd years in the life of Pete Bravado, a third-generation Italo-American born into working class Brooklyn. Bravado’s early aspirations are ...”

“... like the law itself, as if all unlawful appetites were but a source of dreamy speculation.Once in London, where, as usual, the summer is unseasonably warm, and leaden, as if everybody has breathed out and nobody wants to breathe in, she proceeds ...There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven ...”

“... could be described as the well-oiled engine of the typical opening ceremony. Danny Boyle, for London 2012, might have invented a new sort of display in which we remember our values. Glasgow had a bit of that too, although for the Second City of the Empire, its nostalgia for industrial glory came a weak second to images of celebrity and sugar. In ...”

“... Three scenes from London life. 1) Westminster in 1999, when the tidal wave of ‘bogus asylum seekers’ that would break across tabloid front pages was just a gentle swell on the horizon. A House of Commons standing committee is discussing the Government’s proposal to replace welfare benefits (of around £46 a week) with a system of food vouchers worth £35 a week ...”

“... the earliest Shakespearean allusions, to Henry VI, Part 2. ‘Away with him! He speaks Latin,’ Jack Cade says in Act IV. ‘If Jack Cade were alive,’ Weelkes says, ‘yet some of us might live: unlesse we should think, as the Artisans in the Universities in Poland and Germany thinke, that the Latin tongue comes by ...”

“... or commercial development had produced something resembling a class society: in the towns – London above all – and in areas with mixed industrial and agrarian economics. It is less easily applied to the wider world of rural England’ – which Underdown goes on to discuss. G.R. Elton’s piece on ‘Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace’ is ...”

“... For the last six months, a Scot reading the London papers, or watching London-made political TV shows, could only conclude that a sharp dislike of Scots and Scotland is spreading across South Britain. The reports suggest a bout of Scotophobia without parallel since the violently anti-Scottish mood of the English mob in Lord Bute’s day ...”

“... famished stomach refused to retain for a moment. He was then placed in a cab and conveyed to the London Hospital, where he lingered for about an hour and died; the coroner’s jury subsequently returned a verdict of ‘Death from starvation’. Who are we to dispute with a coroner, or doubt that eastwards of the City the daily problem is the problem of ...”

“... the shop assistant straight out of Mr Polly, had risen to influence through local government in London, including the leadership of the London County Council. The later decline in the authority of trade unionists in Parliament was to have serious consequences, but the virtual disappearance of senior figures in local ...”

“... the Sunday papers. These novelists make comments which only need to have ‘Beryl mused’ or ‘Jack protested’ tacked on here and there to make the narrators products of their own imaginations. ‘Whoever said that England can’t produce enough food for her own consumption? All the way to Birmingham the land was heavy with apple orchards and fields of ...”

“... in late May, spread quickly to Kent and on 13 June the rebels gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the ...”

“... firm’s ‘burnbox’ with him, he goes to earth. He is hunted by his ‘deceived protector’, Jack Brotherhood (le Carré loves a resonant name). The burnbox is so called because it will combust on command. It contains top secrets and the station gun: will Magnus use the one treacherously to defect, or the other to end things honourably? While this ...”

“... fog and gaslight; Stevenson, Wilde and Pater props and accessories: revolver, boxing gloves, jack-knife, briar pipe, jewelled snuffbox, Stradivarius violin, a penchant for recondite chemistry, cocaine, Sarasate and the polyphonic motets of Lassus – and eyelids that are a little weary, like the Mona Lisa’s. When he first appeared, in the novella A ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem ...”

“... lives rarely chronicled elsewhere. There is poor René Harris, a Catholic organ-maker in Augustan London eager to improve himself. We learn that someone this marginal nonetheless wanted and was able to commission a portrait of his wife. But it was while he was away mending organs to pay for such status-objects that this same wife, who was either fatuous or an ...”