“... 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 ...”

“... Roman times.Landemare’s education was sporadic. Her father’s job meant that the family went to London for the season, where the outdoor servants had lodgings in Little Grosvenor Mews. She left school at the age of 13: ‘I loved to read about the different things that happened in the Reformation [but] that wouldn’t get me a living.’ Her mother invoked ...”

“... a schoolboy, ‘without finding what I really wanted’. The copy of Later Days I looked at in the London Library (most of his works now being out of print) is full of exasperated marginalia – ‘vulgar’, ‘silly’, ‘you ass’ – and was last borrowed 13 years ago. Oblivion has succeeded condescension. There have been a couple of valiant attempts to ...”

“... English still seemed to assume that literature in Britain meant anglophone literature published in London, and usually written there too. Anyone doubting that all this has changed for ever over the course of a generation which has seen the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the founding of the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament needs only to feel ...”

“... and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play for today is to cut through a lot of differences between Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is defensible, given the ...”

“... evil and unjust.’ To limit the scandal, the authorities cannily decided not to court-martial Mad Jack, as he was known because of his reckless bravery, but to hospitalise him instead.On 18 August Owen finally summoned up the courage to knock on his fellow inmate’s door, clutching several copies of Sassoon’s first book, The Old Huntsman and Other ...”

“... Statesman already existed in India. (It still does, and those who have been inclined to bemoan the London magazine’s fate might reflect that there are worse ones. In recent years its Indian namesake, under the editorship of an Oxford-educated former Trotskyist, has become a cheerleader for the Hindu supremacist, ultra-right BJP.) The New Statesman’s ...”

“... which she returned to Brighton for two years, started painting as well as writing, returned to London, worked for a publisher, rented a room in Soho, wrote a novel, had it rejected, started another one, worked in a Cornish hotel, had a breakdown, escaped to Paris, came back, worked part-time as a secretary at the Royal College of Art, finished a second ...”

“... In fact he was an insider/outsider twice over, a peripheral Protestant at home washed up in alien London with only his wits and verbal dexterity to hawk. As such, he joined an honourable lineage of Irish licensed jesters from Oliver Goldsmith to Brendan Behan (Terry Wogan and Graham Norton are minor offshoots), men who punctured English pomposity and found ...”

“... and the ‘settler’ countries of Africa began to see him in their dreams. I have met women in London and Cape Town, Berlin and Los Angeles, who talked about this haunting. Sometimes he was a black priapic bogeyman; more often, he was a dark and reproachful presence who inspired unbearable guilt and terror. It seemed not to matter whether the dreamer was a ...”

“... a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy. ‘I’m on it with Jack McConnell,’ I said. ‘Who’s McConnell?’ ‘Scottish First Minister.’ ‘Well, I never . . .’ This was a benign version of the Jowett syndrome but serious enough: Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff have become places apart. As the days tick away ...”

“... while Lloyd George loved the idea of Wales he was in fact soon bored by it and greatly preferred London. (It was the same with his family: he proclaimed his devotion very loudly but consistently neglected it.) In effect he was making the whole principality of Wales his political base and gradually extending his role from spokesman for Welsh Nonconformity to ...”

“... from first to last, is to demonise its subject. The young Cromwell was ‘an opportunistic jack-the-lad, a ruffian on the make’. Possessed of a ‘remarkable gift of low animal cunning’ and a ‘capacity for raw deceit’, the mature statesman was ‘ambitious and totally corrupt’; quite properly, ‘the most hated man in the kingdom’, not ...”

“... In 1989, I was invited to a party in London. I was a graduate student at Oxford, supposedly writing a dissertation on D.H. Lawrence but actually doing nothing of the sort. Instead, I’d completed a short novel; an extract from it had appeared in this paper, as had a poem and a review. It was on the basis of these that I must have been invited that night to the party, which was a celebration of the London Review of Books’s tenth anniversary ...”