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“... eighth child, Henry, managed to persuade his father he was worthy of bearing the Dickens name in London: he got himself sent to Cambridge and trained in the law at great expense. Expense was now a crucial issue, since the children who had left England, or whom Dickens had sent away, all suffered from what Gottlieb calls ‘the fatal family weakness of ...”

“... angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the drawing. ‘Catterline in Winter’, c.1963. Her seascapes and ...”

“... he worked in Cambridge on the Gothic interior of All Saints Church and Queen’s Old Hall; in London, he worked on the mansions of the Gilbert Scott, Flower and Howard families. He bought 186 Gwydir Street in 1886 with money he’d saved in his post office account and, with his wife, Mary Jane, and their three children, lived there until he died, in ...”

“... is the titular character of Enola Holmes (on Netflix), directed by Harry Bradbeer and adapted by Jack Thorne from a novel by Nancy Springer. Springer has written more than fifty books for young adults, going some way towards confirming that this category often has nothing to do with the age of the reader, and means only that the writing is better than a lot ...”

“... have their own histories and agendas, but are fatally flawed by the need to sustain a link with London. Binding’s novels belong to commuters who do not commute, or those who have escaped their roots and are paying the price for it. The Vale of Aylesbury (A Perfect Execution) and the Medway (In the Kingdom of Air) are viscerally invoked, without recourse ...”

“... than three million books.The appeal of the Tudor novels owes much to Sansom’s protagonist, a London lawyer named Matthew Shardlake. He is a methodical and candid narrator; there’s a hint that the novels are confessional memoirs written late in life. When we first meet him he’s in his mid-thirties, lives in a nice house in Chancery Lane, has a horse ...”

“... was ceded to England in 1807 and still continues under English supremacy … Hotels: City of London, Queen of England, Belvedere … Table d’hôte everywhere at 3 p.m… . à la carte at the Deutscher Hof and Fremdenwillkomm.Baedeker, 1868Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Deutschland! (Adolf Hitler, 18 March 1938). A worthwhile steamer trip leads to the ...”

“... The arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London last October, at the request of a Spanish magistrate, marked the beginning of a saga that has already had a significant effect on international law and the British Constiution. At the same time it has exposed a profound uncertainty in the British Government’s commitment to ethics, human rights and international law in the making of foreign policy ...”

“... for the New Millennium Experience, was once the resting place for the carpet-wrapped cadaver of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. This sinister wasteland, first left out of the tunnel, marked the limits of Lambrianou’s imagination. And the close of an era, if not a millennium, of creative alliances between showbiz, disorganised crime and bent politicians. An ...”

“... on territory that doesn’t, strictly speaking, belong to them. Carolyn, in stately exile in North London, calls into question the eternal present-tense rush of On the Road. They can’t both be true, not at the same time. That plural consciousness is too much to accept. But Carolyn is, self-evidently, very much alive, and feels obliged, as a duty, to swoop on ...”

“... occasion, I tried 42 versions, but the final effect was too lapidary – you know what I mean, Jack? What the hell are you trying to extort – my trade secrets?’ As everyone knows, being a funny man is no laughing matter: our most popular clowns seem almost expected to have a savage, twisted underside to their natures. Perelman, who lived entirely off ...”

“... to diminish when the Regency palace built in the Welsh marches was sold, and the family moved to London, eventually settling in Wimpole Street. Elizabeth’s creation of her health was part of the way she made her own life, and its manipulation continued after her marriage. The adolescent illness which prostrated her, possibly measles or rheumatic fever, she ...”

“... This seems to be the mantra of the titans of commodity trading interviewed by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy: ‘We are just here for the money; we are not doing politics.’ I suppose it all depends on what you take ‘politics’ to mean.The origin myth of today’s commodity trades goes back to the era of decolonisation. But they can of course be traced ...”

“... fleuve gives a much truer picture of varieties of behaviour in the monde of the time, in Oxford, London or the country. Pansy Lamb, Powell’s sister-in-law, who liked Waugh, ventured to point out to him that the upper classes were not a bit like that really. But the ‘Brideshead Generation’ is how the reader wants them to be, and like all fantasies ...”

“... imagine concretely – that one could then quite unremarkably drive from door to door in Central London and park one’s car outside one’s club. This is the world in which Sassoon is moving around in the years recorded in this third volume of the diaries. Although at the beginning he is riding in the Cotswold Open Race in which, as he says with heavy ...”