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“... rabies. Then there are the gases: methane, hydrogen sulphide, and fumes from whichever effluents London businesses have poured down their drains and toilets today. A form is handed to me, as I stand in the robing section of the Thames Water van, struggling with my waders. The van is well equipped, with a table and microwave, a small TV and a basin and ...”

“... scaffolds which they have erected give their players room to move. The Letter of Marque opens with Jack Aubrey dismissed the service after a conviction for rigging the Stock Market – a crime of which he was innocent. He is set up as master of a private man-of-war by his newly rich friend, Maturin, a Naval physician who also serves the Admiralty as a secret ...”

“... in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger. This man turns out to be Mr Peggotty, who emigrated to Australia with what remained of his family ten years previously, together with the Micawbers. And they have all ...”

“... a ruling ethos for the nation. The new prime minister will live in a nice house in the middle of London, but it won’t be his house. Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Arron Banks bought it for him. They own 10 Downing Street, and they own him. Amid a cascade of extreme events and consequences, we all tend to lose focus – not just the humble citizen but ...”

“... Charles​ Booth’s survey of London poverty was an epic Victorian undertaking. Beginning in the late 1880s with East London, Booth and his army of investigators launched a systematic study which went on to cover nearly all of the metropolis, then the largest in the world with around four million inhabitants ...”

“... over and over again, with Wedekind himself appearing variously as the Animal-Tamer, Dr Schön and Jack the Ripper. He spent several months in jail for lèse-majesté in a poem about the Emperor; and fought a successful case against the censors who seized the first edition of Pandora’s Box. He consorted with the avant-garde in Germany, Austria and ...”

“... Park Hotel in Knightsbridge. Analyses shows that the number of bedbug calls to pest controllers in London and Australia has increased significantly since 2000. Why the resurgence? The bugs’ resistance to insecticides has been blamed, along with the increase in international travel and in the sale of second-hand furniture. Genetic fingerprinting of the bugs ...”

“... were the ‘Germhuns’. On the magazine’s masthead was an image of John Bull in a Union Jack waistcoat and a top hat, with a riding crop tucked under his arm. The longer Bottomley lived, the more he became that figure.He was forced to resign from Parliament in 1912 when he was declared bankrupt: Eleanor Curtis, the daughter of one of his ...”

“... heraldry, but their running costs were high. The tight-fisted Henry decided that the sheriffs of London should meet the food bill. As menageries went, it could hardly compare with the human menagerie which made up the Plantagenet Court: manikins, minions, ganymedes, whipping-boys, hornblowers, versifiers, tasters, torturers, mummers and a jester to jump in ...”

“... exhibits on an energy level fit to set beside Continental Modernism. But the studios of Victorian London present a further resistance to what now constitutes intelligible artspeak. It is true that 19th-century British criticism dwelt extensively on the way paintings are made: like Duranty, Ruskin was much concerned with facture. Yet the fundamental faith ...”

“... antisocial roads and supermarkets to the demonstrations which over the last two years have taken London, Seattle, Prague and Nice by storm and threaten every future international meeting of trade ministers. ‘The struggle between people and corporations,’ Monbiot writes, ‘will be the defining battle of the 21st century’; and he sets out to prove his ...”

“... of all and sundry; one of the sundry turns out to be his favourite kosher idol, the comedian Jack Benny, who grants him an hour of his presence. Another, more intimate trip has Marks going late at night to 84 Charing Cross Road in order to get inspiration from sitting in the chair Freud had sat in a few years before when he was writing Moses and ...”

“... London now has an autumn season when the big fiction blockbusters are delivered to a public with longer evenings for reading and Christmas money to spend. It may not be anywhere near as clearly marked off as it is in New York and the launching machinery still creaks a bit, but its component parts are familiar from the smoother-running American model ...”

“... fire and two young boys died. In Lahore the violence was orchestrated by the Jamaat-i-Islami (London rep: Sir Iqbal Sacranie), who tried to regain the political initiative by getting young men armed with clubs to attack a bank. Perhaps they needed some cash. One cleric who clearly doesn’t is Maulana Yousaf Qureshi of Peshawar, who is offering a million ...”

“... In​ the mid-1980s, before they moved to London and formed Suede, Brett Anderson and Mat Osman were in a band called Geoff. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house ...”