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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... achieves – given that its raw materials are the raffish and volatile world of late Stuart London, some thoroughly racy contemporary rumours, the traces of a sideline in espionage and a dazzling body of writings overflowing with disguise, wit and tight breeches – is that it produces a remorselessly unglamorous Aphra Behn. Licensed by the shortage of ...”

“... The new novel has married the pair and moved them on to the mid-Sixties and from the provinces to London, where Patrick works misgivingly in a fashionable publishing house. And there are other reappearances from the earlier novel. Each of the novels has an alluring Wendy. Graham McClintoch of ‘the indefensible ginger-coloured suit’ has returned, and there ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... down the social scale, the level of awareness was nearer that suggested in Walter Besant’s East London (1901): The Union Jack is never seen in East London, except on the river, it does not float over the schools; the children are not taught to reverence the flag of their country as the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shop near King’s Cross, an Italian café in Paddington and a compartment in a Bognor Regis to London train.The alarming fact was that hundreds of neat, respectable-seeming middle-aged men in mackintoshes and horn-rimmed specs looked exactly like Reginald Christie. Eventually a bobby on the beat spotted the real Christie in a brown trilby near the Thames ...”

“... or hinting at Iberian sympathies – and the look on Donne’s face suggests he knows it. Born in London in 1572, a year after a doomed international conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I with her papist cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Donne was, as Katherine Rundell puts it in her new biography, ‘not just Catholic … but super-Catholic’, the scion of a double ...”