“... 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 ...”

“... designer Misha Black; in it Rowe suggested the formation of an ‘artist revolutionary union’ in London that might be able to serve alongside those formed in the Soviet Union. This letter, Friend suggests, was the starting point for Artists International, soon renamed the Artists International Association (AIA), which brought together Communist artists in a ...”

“... of mutton and potatoes under it’ on which the company is feasting in The Pickwick Papers while Jack Hopkins tells the story of the child who swallowed a necklace. Dickens couldn’t stop sensing. ‘His imagination overwhelms everything,’ Orwell concluded, ‘like a kind of weed.’ But it isn’t enough to notice him noticing. Dickens did a great deal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Aberdeen Weekly Journal reported that the establishment of a rudimentary telephone system in London had ‘justified the most sanguine expectations of its proprietors’. By the turn of the century the telephone had become a necessary basis for the proper organisation of middle-class social, economic and cultural life in major cities around the ...”

“... Their secret services stopped co-operating. Gordon Brown refused all meetings with Putin. In London, Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, was told by the Foreign Office to sit tight and wait while the UK tried to find a way to extradite the killers through back-channel negotiations. In 2010 she was still waiting. When Cameron became prime minister, Luke Harding ...”

“... To the rat-a-tat-tat​ of a drum, they march on London. Climate protesters? Milk-price complainers taking inspiration from their cousins across the Channel? Some historical re-enactment rump? It must be charity. Look at the cameras. There aren’t enough of them to bring out Boris Johnson, who never failed, in all the years of his mayoralty, to insert himself on the television ‘news where you are’ for London: in hardhat, bicycle helmet, scrumcap squashed down on the finger-flicked golden mopflop of thuggish charm ...”

“... not unusual to come upon a paperback copy of Ben Hecht’s A Child of the Century.’ In suburban London homes in the early 1960s it was very unusual indeed. Hecht said he had managed to ‘anger the whole of Great Britain to the remarkable point of being officially boycotted (as if I were a one-man enemy country)’, and his memoir wasn’t published in the ...”

“... Just before the outbreak of war the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) moved from London to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. In 1939, some hundred or so people were working there; by the end of the war there were about seven thousand. This book contains reminiscences by 30 of them, describing what they did and what life was like at Bletchley ...”

“... up, and voted by six to five to reject a devolution platform. Wilson was appalled. Labour in London decided that Home Rule would have to be imposed on the Scots whether they liked it or not. On 24 July, the National Executive called on the party in Scotland to reconsider its position, and on 17 August, a special meeting of the Scottish Council of the ...”

“... issue and used it to attack the interests they had until very recently represented: the City of London, big business, the Union, even Whitehall. To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, how did we end up in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – setting about the seemingly deliberate demolition of the United Kingdom and its ...”

“... speeches and music, long queues have formed at the tents, despite the rain. The equivalent, in London, of block-long queues of umbrella-bearing book hunters is hard to imagine. Ferenc tells me runs of 120,000 copies of some titles can sell out in a day or two. Is this, I wonder, a case of creating demand by limiting supply? There is some evidence that it ...”

“... of rooms, stairways, toilets, closets, hallways, bathtubs, gloryholes and sex equipment,’ wrote Jack Fritscher, then editor of the leather magazine Drummer. This sounds like Gunn’s description, in ‘Saturday Night’, of San Francisco’s club the Barracks, with its ‘labyrinthine corridors’ and rooms for every ...”