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“... But our isolation wasn’t complete since my father was travelling to and fro between Cork and London by boat and train. It was a hot summer and my nanny, Kitty Lee, would take me to swim in the sea and build sandcastles on the long sandy beaches. One day in late September, Kitty and I walked into Youghal to visit my cousin Shirley, with whom I often ...”

“... morally compromised foreign dignitaries as could be persuaded to take a mini-break to springtime London. The only obvious sensitivity observed during this circus – so unlike the private funerals of Attlee and most of Thatcher’s predecessors as prime minister – was that the funerary flotilla kept off the Thames. Churchill could be invoked but not so ...”

“... and 1985, the Royal Commission on British Nuclear Tests in Australia, sitting in Australia and London, under the able, vain and quarrelsome ‘Diamond Jim’ McLelland, unearthed tons of documents from British archives and conducted two interviews with the bewildered Lord Penney. (The report and evidence of the Royal Commission are not in the British ...”

“... alternative long-term solutions. Either the islands are supplied from eight thousand miles away (London to Port Stanley 8350 miles), or they once again depend on Argentina for fuel, fresh food supplies, general victualling and hospital services. After the events of the last eight weeks there is not the remotest possibility that any South American nation ...”

“... Away they rumble up the Edgware Road; the gradual emergence from the brick and mortar of London being marked as well by the telling out of passengers as by the increasing distances between the houses. First, it is all huddle with both. Austere iron railings guard the subterranean kitchen areas, and austere looks indicate a desire on the part of the ...”

“... for American engineering and his criticisms of mainstream American architecture. Arriving in London in late 1950, Stirling followed the novice architect’s path of trial and error, boredom and setbacks, but was always resilient, his self-belief keeping him buoyant. Sandy Wilson, the designer of the British Library, who met him soon afterwards and became ...”

“... described Spitalfields as a classic inner-city ‘zone of transition’. Bordering on the City of London, the place had traditionally been a densely-populated ‘service centre for the metropolis’ where wave after wave of immigrants struggled to gain a foothold on the urban economy: Huguenot silk weavers, the Irish who were set to work undercutting ...”

“... were grounds for suspicion, Dennis Nilsen, who strangled and dismembered 14 or 15 youths in North London over a period of five years, would have been rounded up with the rest of us. But there were no grounds for suspecting anyone of being guilty of these murders, for until the grim day in February two years ago when a plumber found human remains in the sewer ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... with Eugene Ivanov, the vodka-loving Soviet Naval Attaché, who was having great success in London society and who was also a friend of Ward. Profumo denied the liaison in the House of Commons, admitted it three months later and resigned. Incredible rumours of sex parties circulated, the frenzy of the century gripped Fleet Street, and the Macmillan ...”

“... dilettante. On a sodden Saturday afternoon in January, the three-mile trip from the South London suburb of Stockwell to Clapham Junction is a dispiriting proposition. I had to go and get some paint from the aptly named Paint House on Northcote Road, and decided to take the tube to Clapham Common then walk across it, thereby exercising both myself and ...”

“... if not the precise belief that ‘to be human is to be English,’ turns up a little later in Jack London’s ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’. Here the ‘disgusting ocean of life’ that is China is drained by means of diseases dropped in glass tubes from the air. The yellow hordes try to escape infection, but the Western powers terminate their ...”

“... couldn’t make head nor tail of him.’ MacNeice’s problem, in the words of his BBC colleague Jack Dillon, was that he was an introvert trying to be an extrovert. He badly needed to feel he belonged to a group, and at the same time he hated institutions. His early experiences of trying to find a niche were mostly failures. Though he distinguished himself ...”

“... forces in the west and leading them towards the capital, James could still count on the support of London’s crowds, and his warning that if William took power he might prove ‘a worse man than Cromwell’ played well with them. But James was prone to ominous forebodings, and when the crisis came his courage deserted him. On 18 December he allowed himself to ...”

“... into a symbol of Englishness; thousands of patriotic broadsides and ballads were circulated; the London stage devoted itself to evocations of Agincourt and Blenheim; and volunteering became so popular that, according to J.E. Cookson, more than one in five of the male population of military age went into armed service. Such a sudden burst of martial fervour ...”