“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of war. He tried his hand at most jobs in the building trade, and at worst had to dig roads: ‘a jack of all trades’, he always says, ‘master of none’. Now 81, he has spent the last two years in and out of hospital with multiple myeloma, a cancer which attacks both the blood and bones. It frequently affects elderly men and is sometimes linked to the ...”

“... Kirk in East Lothian, which was totally destroyed, the refreshment room in Regent’s Park in London and houses in Liverpool and Manchester. There were other ‘outrages’, as the press called them: a railway carriage set ablaze; pillar boxes ‘fired’ with phosphorus packets which burned when exposed to air; telegraph and telephone wires cut; glass ...”

“... mayhem.The Fatal Alliance is to some degree autobiographical: ‘I was born in February 1941, in a London being bombed, and I was told by everyone in my childhood that it was a good thing “we” had won the war.’ To the visceral pleasures of the battle scene could now be added the moral intoxication of victory in a ‘just’ war: a war there had been no ...”

“... 13 years the curtains have been opening and shutting dramatically. Fraga had been ambassador to London during Franco’s last years (one of his favourite photographs shows him in a bowler hat in front of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square), but on the dictator’s death he returned to Spain with the intention of becoming prime minister. He spent a ...”

“... now to the judges’ lodgings: the Court of Appeal, with occasional exceptions, stays put in London. ‘Lodgings’ sound modest enough, a bit like actors’ digs; but a few years ago I got home from my summer holiday to find messages on the answerphone from several broadsheet legal correspondents. After a false start (I phoned a journalist friend to ask ...”

“... you to buy a decent pair of trousers? Mods posed a far less obvious threat. They flew the Union Jack, after all, and most of them had jobs; they were clean, well turned-out and had nice haircuts. In 1964 there was a brief spasm of tabloid outrage over some rather tame skirmishes between Mods and Rockers, mostly conducted in bracing seaside ozone. Talk of ...”

“... The devolution of government to Scotland and Wales and the restoration of municipal government to London have been the most far-reaching constitutional changes since the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. That may sound good, but between 1922 and devolution there were no constitutional changes at all, other than a slight weakening of the powers of the ...”

“... how noot I that thou were slawe.’ As for the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when the rebels entered London they did so by marching under Chaucer’s gatehouse apartment: Chaucer mentions the event only once, and then to make a joke of it, though a joke which implies actual presence at murder – killing the Flemings (which ...”

“... or by ‘the author of …’) and she was determined to keep her identity hidden, if not from London circles (her brother Henry couldn’t resist boasting), then at least from the circles she moved in. Propriety was a factor, of course, but she doesn’t appear to have been constrained by it. Her letters show that the money was useful and the success of ...”