“... a par with the megacities of the emergent East or Africa, still takes a very long day to egress on foot: if you leave at around 7 a.m., and are reasonably fit, you may find yourself in open fields late that evening. Following Connolly, what this says about London I’m not absolutely sure: all I do know is that after doing a couple of these radial walks ...”

“... It’s sentimental, don’t you know? and neither Hill, nor Thompson, plodding Williams or doggy Foot can swing the people. Whoever’s heard of Despard, Plug, or Captain Ludd? – dumped in Burford Churchyard bee thoi oll. No, we must lie down and let the Tebbit knock us through the ground. He’s got the goods, as Clive would say – the wit, the guns, the ...”

“... In September 2004, the German sculptor John Bock turned the main gallery at the ICA into something like a giant treehouse, a cluster of cabins, platforms and dens bashed together out of plywood and hung about with tinfoil, blankets and washing-lines. To get between them you’d climb ladders and squeeze through tunnels, balance on walkways and clamber over hay bales ...”

“... answering the questions it demands you ask. Enigma depends on an essential silence. The twenty-foot image of Garbo might talk, or even laugh, but the creature you see on the screen does not speak her own words, tell her own story or even wear her own clothes. We’re given nothing of the real individual except the endless opportunity for unsatisfied ...”

“... to their typewriters each afternoon, and again after they had finished their labours. Michael Foot would become the paper’s principal political columnist, and there would be generous severance pay for staff members who found these changes unacceptable. In the event the company lawyers made no mistake, and when Lord Beaverbrook died the newspapers passed ...”

“... Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) is the most recognisable, though I prefer Myrtle Gordon in John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977). Myrtle, played by Gena Rowlands, is in the twilight of her career and bent on sabotaging the play for which she’s currently rehearsing. She drinks too much; is haunted by a woman with a striking resemblance to her ...”

“... boring Holloway to good old Peckham on the south side of the river, nearer the centre of things. John Jensen’s illustrations match Weedon Grossmith’s very neatly. Carrie thought the Pooters’ house rather too near the railway line, and deemed her husband’s jolly friend, Gowing, a touch too bibulous: to express her point of view, Jensen has embellished ...”

“... one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what happened when James Callaghan resigned the leadership late ...”

“... or cruelty – or, more starkly, as eating people – is the central theme of Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar. Her remarkable novel takes up the ancient story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in ...”

“... Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have had no better champion since John Wayne. The nation’s youth have another icon on which to click. What makes his resuscitation the more beguiling is that New Labour’s project has been built on an emphatic rejection of Bennism. In 1981, backed by the hard Left in the unions and the ...”

“... reported his findings to the president and his officials, including the White House counsel, John Dean. As 1972 was an election year, the strategy of the White House focused on containment. In the short term, at least, the president’s men were successful. The break-in did not become a big story. On 19 June Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, called ...”

“... best as figures of some social value and at worst as licentious rogues. The bishop and philosopher John of Salisbury argued in the 12th century that when it came to ‘actors and mimes, clowns and prostitutes, pimps and similar prodigal men’, the ideal prince ‘ought rather to exterminate than to encourage’ them. In a penitential composed around 1216, the ...”

“... irritated journalists on other newspapers. Part of the story he has to tell is how people like John Cole – yes, the same John Cole – and his successor as News Editor. Jean Stead, dragged the paper more or less reluctantly into mainstream, news-oriented journalism. Coming from what at the time was probably the most ...”

“... got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did ...”

“... dry Tobacco in’. ‘Great Iulius Commentaries lies and rots,’ the poet and waterman John Taylor wrote, ‘as good for nothing but stoppe mustard pots.’ Sir William Cornwallis kept ‘pamphlets and lying-stories and two-penny poets’ in his privy, and many texts were ‘pressed into general service’, as Margaret Spufford put it in Small ...”