“... of prisons. The second secretary of state had privatised the probation service. The third, Michael Gove, had decided to sell off the London prisons, which stood on prime city-centre real estate. Liz Truss, the fourth, had rented out floors in our office building, got rid of more managers and promised to reduce costs across prisons and courts with new ...”

“... Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the monumental ruggedness of his face, its deep furrows like plough marks crossing a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by David ...”

“... Tower, all the burgeoning ‘silos of residential units’, as the architectural critic Rowan Moore calls them, create one terrible problem. They are not just streets in the sky: they are another city, another country. A Super Strip Mall of protected debt and solipsism. The developers are based in Dubai, in China and Malaysia. They employ celebrity ...”

“... was publicly executed in the city afterwards. Emmet’s death was memorialised in songs by Thomas Moore, a poem by Shelley and an elegy by Berlioz. Emmet’s speech from the dock which ended, ‘When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written,’ was considered a masterpiece of its kind. Henry ...”

“... just celebrity columnists’. The Battle had its big names too: Paul Mason from Newsnight, Suzanne Moore from the Mail on Sunday, the novelist Philip Hensher. Some people refuse to stand on an IoI platform, considering them clandestine and creepy. Others are a bit doubtful, but take part in the events in the interests of free debate. Others again want the ...”

“... cousins and relatives, the church figuring among his inspirations much as Methley did for Henry Moore. 21 May. An absurd accident. I am cycling down Gloucester Avenue this morning when my raincoat catches between the brake block and the wheel and brings me to a halt. Normally when this happens a step or two back reverses the wheel and frees the coat but not ...”

“... to this London post-punk scene of an international idea of what an avant-garde might be,’ Michael Bracewell explained to Kraus. Acker explored the roots of her own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial ...”

“... and hamlets, to … the furthest reach’. Returning, she passes by the Catholic cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, and (we are now in the past tense) ‘hearing the bell calling the faithful to the evening service, Charlotte Brontë did something strange and entirely uncharacteristic: she followed the worshippers in.’Charlotte wrote to Emily of that ...”

“... out of bed, the fumes killing them while they slept. This seems to have been the fate of Ligaya Moore, a 78-year-old woman who came from the Philippines 45 years earlier, fulfilling a dream she’d had from childhood, to live in London. Mrs Moore died in her bed surrounded by photos of her husband, Jim, a retired British ...”