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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more elusive epitaph. As his grave at Westminster Abbey was being covered, a passer-by, Sir Jack Young, noticed that the headstone was still blank. He ‘gave the fellow eighteeen pence’ to cut an inscription. It read simply: ‘O Rare Benn Jonson’. Like the portraitist, Jonson’s biographer has to achieve a kind of dual image. He has to convey ...”

“... the condition of engaged Sixties Northern dramatist to cushy, artistic degeneration in Seventies London. The overlaid image is that of the childhood Christmas tree, whose roots his parents used to keep fresh and alive in soil. In 1980, his creative sap dried up, Brian marries desperately into the Southern working classes. His wife is a vulgar former ...”

“... essay of complaint in the Spectator after his new volume of essays had been underhailed by the London reviewers. Again, I was named among the guilty men and Vidal’s tone, like Mailer’s, was shrill, vengeful and tremulous with self-regard. It was not that the reviewers had been ‘wrong’ about his book: it was simply that, in one way or ...”

“... in head offices. Few news organisations had an informed reporter on the spot. Most sent London-based firemen whose specialist knowledge consisted of what they could cram from head office cuttings files on the flight out. A British angle is the line editors love the most. Yet strangely no one mentioned the UK’s active encouragement of the massacres ...”

“... to permit Palestinian delegates (much less anybody significant from their own side) to travel to London. Blair’s much heralded conference became little more than a video-link discussion of the type seen regularly on Newsnight. The Israeli Government did not even bother to inform the British Government in advance of their decision to starve the conference ...”

“... to impose the will of Number 10 on local Labour organisations – the Welsh Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John Kampfner described Cook as an isolated figure forced to recognise both that he would never succeed Blair as party leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his ...”