“... grandmother had fled from Cossack persecution at Dvinsk. Flora Solomon, the author of Baku to Baker Street, was brought up in Minsk, a nearby town in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. She, too, had a gambler-philanderer-millionaire for a father, and she too, was impelled by her upbringing to become a socialist, and even to pass on the contagion to her son ...”

“... Lincoln and King transformed these figures in national memory from trouble-makers into healers, as Michael Eric Dyson puts it in I May Not Get there with You, an attempt to bring King back to political life. But while Lincoln turned in his last months from racial justice to national reconciliation, King had been moving in the opposite direction at the time of ...”

“... the bewildering number of names she gave herself and those near her (most famously changing Ida Baker into ‘I Lesley Moore’) was an indication of how she used her experiences as experiments to be made real through fiction. Her engagement to a musician, her strange one-day marriage to George Bowden, her subsequent pregnancy by the musician’s ...”

“... and most films noirs – and the soundtrack is full of the laid-back sounds of the Fifties, Chet Baker, Dean Martin, Johnny Mercer. When Kay Starr’s brassy voice sings ‘Wheel of Fortune’ you return not to the historical time of the song, but to the happy simplicity of the world you imagined when you listened to the song. The clothes and hair-dos have a ...”

“... the Memorial, became ‘the most important figure in Chesterton’s life’, according to David Baker in Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism. The two met when Chesterton went to interview Flower, ‘whose reign over Stratford-upon-Avon came as near absolutism as made no odds’. Flower was impressed by Chesterton’s refusal to use ...”

“... has the advantage of speaking in the soundbites beloved by American television interviewers. As Michael Sheridan wrote in the Independ ent on 2 November. the Israelis possessed the best organised, most efficient, least flustered, public relations team at the conference, with Mr Netanyahu, its intellectual bruiser, rushing before the CNN cameras every other ...”

“... regular Romeo’. But nobody has ever been called ‘a peeping Poirot’. Why is this? Why is Baker Street as universally associated with Conan Doyle’s hero as is Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood, or Greyfriars School with Billy Bunter? These are hard questions, and must be put aside in favour of the simple observation that in the bookshops, as the ...”

“... rides through Ealing, Leeds and Southampton, and in 1910, A Trip on the Metropolitan Railway from Baker St to Uxbridge and Aylesbury. Starling’s art has frequently involved the reconstruction or repurposing of ramshackle machines. In 2005 he won the Turner Prize with Shedboatshed, rebuilding a tumbledown hut from the banks of the Rhine as a small ...”

“... moves’, a problem for shortlisted novelists leading sedentary lives, but not for the impressive Michael Collins – author of The Keepers of Truth and a keen runner. As well as completing his novel, Collins has managed to finish a marathon. A jog through the streets of London dressed up in rhino costume wasn’t quite challenging enough for him, however: he ...”

“... helicopter company, discerning, as he does so, a campaign to discredit her Secretary for Defence, Michael Heseltine, who subsequently resigned. He claims, moreover, that she again misled the Commons over the American use of British bases to bomb Libya, and he sees her influence behind the police raids on BBC premises in Glasgow in the wake of the uproar over ...”

“... gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.’ These few lines supply the background to Michael Chabon’s novella, which begins thirty years later on the South Downs. The main character is an ‘old man’, once a famous detective, now devoted to his bees. He remains unnamed throughout, but given that he wears an Inverness cape and hunting cap, and ...”

“... but rigorous’ weave of it. A Spanish sound engineer accompanies the jazz musician Chet Baker to Florence for a concert, forgets the rest of his life, and ends up staying there for months himself, alone; the young Muñoz Molina was fascinated and envious. The concept of a ‘winter in Florence’ was an early version of the subsequent Winter in ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”

“... it with the butt of a rifle, but it only squeaked, and continued to roam over our camping space. Baker solved the problem by firing at it with the twelve bore. That was the last we saw of it. There is a sense in which the freshness and unself-consciousness of this episode is too strong for the larger context. As the novel proceeds, one can come to regret ...”