“... chanting of verse. Foster has much quiet fun with the psalteries, and for good measure reproduces Jack Yeats’s satirical drawing of his brother explaining ‘speaking to the psaltery’ to an audience in the American Wild West. Nobody seemed to like what Shaw called the ‘nerve-destroying crooning’ this practice entailed, except of course the poet, who ...”

“... on the phone, Karel Reisz and his wife, Betsy Blair, were always at the centre of talk. The London Review decided to orchestrate a tribute to this most elegant and spirited of men, and immediately there was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads ...”

“... is not German, it is not surprising that Blake does not capitalize every noun in his poem ‘London’ (Songs of Experience). But then he does capitalise Man, Infants, Chimney-sweeper, Church, Soldier, Palace and Marriage. Why? The reader of a scholarly modern edition like that in the Longman English Poets series is not even in a position to realise that ...”

“... the temptation of saying too much. Crick quite often catches him doing so. In one of the wartime London Letters to Partisan Review Orwell reported that when the authorities tore down railings for scrap they ravaged working-class parks and squares but left upper-class ones alone. When his wife pointed out that this allegation was demonstrably false, he ...”

“... boy who passed up his place in art school for the chance to get at the city. Any city. But London would do for starters. That was the new life: transcription. Nights on the drift, clubtime noise, then the real high of turning experience, the very next morning, before it disappeared, into serviceable prose.) If everybody loved Penman on Paul ...”

“... hadn’t already guessed. Inside, there’s an entity called Ali who lives in Spitalfields, East London: ‘The sign on the shop says VERDE, nothing more, but everyone knows that something strange goes on inside.’ (This building really exists, I noticed, on one of the streets by Spitalfields market. It’s a former greengrocer’s which seems to have been ...”

“... Early on, they single out their adversaries as, pre-eminently, Shula Marks, Geoff Berridge and Jack Spence. ‘For some scholars, no doubt, archival work is logistically too difficult or temperamentally uncongenial. Such must survive by their theorising, and hope to invent a concept which catches on. But history is too important to be left to the ...”

“... first five editions of the paper but disappeared from the final one – the edition which went to London and was seen by Lord Kemsley, the Evening Chronicle’s proprietor. Kemsley had financial interests in the cotton industry. While the youthful Cudlipp was emerging as a man to watch, King was indulging his lifelong habit of feeling sorry for himself. He ...”

“... describes the consequences this decision had all over the world. Black activists in Paris, London and New York united across factional lines to challenge white rule in the Caribbean and fascist aggression in Africa, accompanied by all the classic acrimonies. At a 1935 meeting of the Comintern-backed Union des Travailleurs Nègres (UTN) to organise ...”

“... Brown Clark ran away from his bourgeois Glasgow home at thirteen, living in India, Australia and London before working as a surgeon in Edinburgh; by the 1880s, this ‘inveterate joiner of organisations’ had become dedicated to temperance, land reform and the independence of the Transvaal, and won election to Parliament as a Crofters’ MP for ...”

“... every two days, the whole machine broke down.The man who improved on the vacuum tube was the London-born American physicist William Shockley. After the war, Shockley was employed at Bell Labs, the research branch of the US telephone monopoly, AT&T. He realised that certain chemical elements could perform a similar function of encoding and transmitting 1s ...”

“... bum-banger. He later gave an avenging interview to the Face, asserting that he was the victim of a London faggot literary coterie, consisting of Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and myself. (Amis and I contemplated a letter to the Face, saying that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton, but then dumped the idea.) Now here is Mailer attempting the near-impossible: that ...”

“... threw himself into a passionate quest to find John’s missing body. His haunting poem ‘My Boy Jack’ was in fact written to commemorate the victims of the Battle of Jutland, in particular Boy Jack Cornwell, one of the youngest people to win the VC, but the poem was obviously infused by sorrow for his own son. Hornung ...”

“... Omaha Beach by midget submarine under the nose of German sentries, and on his return to London warned his superiors that there were bound to be tremendous casualties: the beach, he said, was ‘a very formidable proposition’. That wasn’t an exaggeration, but Omaha was the only plausible invasion beach once Utah and Gold had been selected. Given ...”

“... changefulness,’ Ashbery ‘seems to belong to every category we can imagine or desire. Our Jack of Diamonds, he is claimed at one moment for the tradition of Stein and at the next for the tradition of Stevens.’* For most of his career, he was our prize monotreme, eluding our neat categories, and if he occasionally laid an egg, you knew he would soon ...”