“... In London, newsagents, sub-post offices and what used to be called grocers, with the three of them absorbed at times into a single unit, are now run almost exclusively by Asians. The same is true in other parts of Brittain: notably, Leicester, Coventry, Bradford, the West Midlands and some of the North-West. And this is just the most visible aspect of Asian business activity in this country ...”

“... glut of sweetmeats provoked a predictable backlash of anti-Petrarchan satire and parody. Among the London types lampooned by Thomas Nashe in Pierce Penniless (1592) is the second-rate sonneteer: ‘All Italianato is his talk … He will be an Inamorato poeta, & sonnet a whole quire of paper in praise of Lady Swinesnout, his yellow-faced mistress.’ In Joseph ...”

“... a little wrinkle in the love triangle involving Bellow, his then wife Sondra, and Sondra’s lover Jack Ludwig, also a member of the Bard English Department. Mustn’t there be, it was suggested, some ‘homosexual component’ – Atlas probably wants to say ‘homosocial’ – in the relationship between the two men? To explain this sort of arrangement, he ...”

“... attorneys who studiously passed through the corridor without comment, defence counsels Ira London and Adrian DiLuzio joked and postured before the cameras, showed off their expensive suits and coifs, and broadcast views of the case that were inadmissible in the courtroom. Most egregiously, London announced to the ...”

“... Patroness.) The year 1717 marked the foundation of the British Grand Lodge, out of four merged London lodges, and in the course of the century the rituals took permanent shape around the legend of King Solomon’s Temple, while the Masonic message crossed the Channel to France, probably borne there by Jacobite exiles. In Britain the middle and professional ...”

“... Five poets performed. Kenneth Rexroth, the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had ...”

“... now have a three-nation approach from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland’). Meanwhile, back in London, nobody tried to claim: ‘We are all in this together’ – the slogan used in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and defaced by the monstrous unfairnesses of ‘austerity’. This moment will pass. Covid-19 will gradually disappear from ...”

“... exotic adventure, even though he may never have left his native country. The son of a prosperous London tallow chandler, he set himself up as a haberdasher, ran a profitable brick and tile factory, dabbled in marine insurance, imported and exported a range of goods and, as a convinced Dissenter, took part in the Duke of Monmouth’s abortive rebellion ...”

“... garden’ are likewise mimicked in the plot. Ackroyd’s double-track narrative switches between London in the period of the Queen Anne churches (say 1714 to 1715, though the building process is telescoped) and the city of today. Across the divide of idiom and landscape, there is a parallelism of event: murders committed in identical places – around the ...”

“... week before he had been in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, and just before that we had had breakfast in London, to which he had just come from Moscow). ‘Noting with pleasure and admiration the superb prose, the witty observation, the admirable structure,’ he immediately volunteered. Why, in the desert of today’s journalistic mediocrity and cowardly ...”

“... Banks combined the enthusiasm and practical competence of one of O’Brian’s fictional heroes, Jack Aubrey, with the passion for natural history of another, Stephen Maturin. Moreover O’Brian’s accounts in his novels of 18th-century seamanship are, like Tolstoy’s battle pieces, better historical description than most historians manage: it was clear ...”

“... priest’, ‘scurvy, stinking, shitten boy’, ‘totter legged and pilled priest’, ‘Scottish jack’, ‘jack sauce and Welsh rogue’, ‘a runagately rogue and a prick-eared rogue’, ‘polled, scurvy, forward, wrangling priest’, ‘wrangler and prattler’, ‘black-coat knave’, ‘drunken-faced knave’ and ...”

“... has an intelligent rock star’s ear for titles: Fighting Terms, My Sad Captains, Touch, Moly, Jack Straw’s Castle, The Man with Night Sweats. Punchy and enigmatic, they read like the back catalogue of a highbrow, low-life singer-songwriter. The career they mark has always had an air of rock rebellion about it, too: soon after publishing his debut ...”

“... lively and informed debate about international law-making, democracy and constitutionalism. Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner, the authors of The Limits of International Law, have contributed significantly to that debate and have played an important role in focusing attention on issues of legitimate concern. A similar debate is needed in Britain, as an ...”

“... Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.’ The London that Muriel Spark describes in The Girls of Slender Means – ‘buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bombsites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity’ – was still in existence when the novel was published in 1963 ...”