“... 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 ...”

“... Anna Davin has risen admirably to the challenges facing the historian of working-class life in London. Dealing with the documents is daunting enough. To begin with, there are 17 volumes of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, published between 1889 and 1903 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hobbies of drinking, smoking and fishing. Having bought a stretch of river, he buried bottles of Jack Daniels at regular intervals in the river bed, so that he could always fish with a whisky and a cigarette in hand. Wright himself emerges as a believable source – though caution is perhaps advisable: he is a professional dissembler. He is that peculiarly ...”

“... legs are too thick,’ he complained) but not Australia’s butter statue of the cricketer Jack Hobbs. I would probably have remembered seeing girls’ skirts being blown over their heads by jets of air had I been allowed anywhere near the amusement park (years later I caught up with this spectacle at Coney Island). What I do remember clearly from this ...”

“... any enthusiasm for the Government. Most people, at least outside Scotland and Wales and possibly London, would probably find it difficult to name anything the Government has actually done. It is also obvious from the Prime Minister’s last couple of speeches that he has seriously lost his bearings. None of this should be a surprise: it was clear from the ...”

“... up which bought up young ‘store’ (or growing) animals in their thousands and drove them to London to fatten on brewery and dairy wastes in Vauxhall, Wandsworth and Battersea. One of the best known of the improved breeds was the Berkshire, to which Wiseman dedicates an extraordinarily unprofitable passage, of which I can only give a flavour. ‘Thus ...”

“... thousand years’. Together with his younger brother, the future James II and VII, and assorted London merchants, the king was set to make a fortune from gold, ivory and enslaved Africans trafficked from the Ivory Coast. While Howe’s antipathy to the monarchy ran deep, he was never one to miss out on a party. So in June 1977, Howe and Frank ...”

“... was planning his next move before the Napoleon of crime had even hit the water. Holmes returned to London – via Florence, Tibet, Persia, Mecca, Khartoum and Montpellier (where he undertook a little research into coal-tar derivatives) – to surprise Dr Watson at his Paddington consulting rooms some years later, in the guise of an elderly bibliophile. By the ...”

“... In 1963, the year of his disgrace, the sleek, balding, faintly exotic Jack Profumo was secretary of state for war. It sounds like an important job – what could matter more than war for the functioning of the state? Undoubtedly this helped to give impetus to the Profumo affair. Help! The war secretary is cavorting with call-girls and Russian spies! But Profumo’s job title was somewhat misleading ...”

“... to kick off with the gigantic Richard’s Feet, which traces the career of Richard Thurgo, a London solicitor, in post-war Hamburg where he is masquerading as an ex-Nazi. Back in England, Thurgo has been presumed dead for some twenty years after his body was supposedly found in the remains of a burnt-out jeep, the only identifiable features being his ...”

“... even at this late hour, by the prospect of hordes of foreigners being seduced into the country by Jack Straw. Several ministers, some for lack of any other strategy, some out of an instinctive xenophobia, press the Prime Minister to ‘play the race card’. The hawks on this subject are the two Michaels, Portillo and Howard, whose fathers were both ...”

“... Chafing at these conventions, Answick (who became Beryl Gilroy on her marriage in 1954) moved to London in 1951 to study educational psychology at the University of London. She was one of very few teachers from the Caribbean in England in the 1950s; another was her friend E.R. Braithwaite, the author of To Sir, with Love ...”

“... There’s Bette Davis and Joe Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s Basil Dean and James Dean, Jack Warner of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore. Kim Novak and Ivor Novello are ...”