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“... 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 ...”

“... he went home and dreamed a strange dream in which ‘Old Hoppity’ turned up at Time-Life’s London offices. The dream, in time, metamorphosed into a poem, which he included in his collection The Very Man (1993). It begins: A man with a limp came towards me begging for money for liquor – spoke of cairns built of skulls, of the wind off the steppes on ...”

“... settlers in North America, Ireland and the Caribbean. But he takes issue with scholars such as Jack Greene who have interpreted all this as evidence of the emergence of an imperial identity. Rather, he suggests, these notions constituted an ideology, and as such were always contested and unstable. In the end, the British failed to find a fully satisfactory ...”

“... returns to her job at the Embassy. A crisis gathers after the bombing, clues are discovered and Jack Queller, a scapegrace CIA agent, is put on the scent. Queller was a big player way back when, ‘the guy who trained bin Laden’ and supplied his mujahids with missiles. After the Russian retreat from Afghanistan, bin Laden betrayed Queller, putting a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the phone while ordering a bouquet for Jennifer, it almost makes the florist cry. Describing Jack, a friend he recalls as greedy and childishly self-absorbed, Saul appears to be drawing a self-portrait. For that matter, his descriptions of his brother and his supposedly authoritarian father seem cartoonish, too intimately informed by his own ...”

“... Reading the Faber Book of English History in Verse in East London was like trying to hold Radio 3 on the FM band.* The wavelength was under fire from all sides, and its measured strains kept giving way to the outlandish rapping and toasting of the local pirate stations. Closing the minister’s volume in dismay, I noticed an image of Nelson dying at Trafalgar on the cover and set off in search of a place where I might try again ...”

“... Wallace Stevens and a host of forgotten describers of circuses, of Russia and of dear old smoky London, and for a while it seems lost in the throng. ‘Lor’ love you, sir,’ it opens in stage Cockney, introducing us to Fevvers, the famous winged lady trapeze artist, toast of Europe and friend of Toulouse Lautrec, a figure who has ‘deformed the ...”

“... to the book. There is no mistaking, and no forgetting, the reality of Mr Pitton the gardener; of Jack, a gardener (his own garden, a very different thing); of Mr and Mrs Phillips, overseeing; of the landlord, overlooking. These are people, of worth, frailty, idiosyncrasy; none of them fudged into being either ‘a one’ or a type, and all of them diversely ...”

“... of circumcision. Other plagues were called Jewish in origin: gambling, prostitution, and now Aids. Jack the Ripper, despite his own disclaimers, must have been a Whitechapel Jew, a shochet or ritual butcher. English anti-semitism, which had a millennial history and an ample supply of stereotypes, now turned on the new immigrants from Eastern Europe. In their ...”

“... edge, the 5.5 million square mile ice-cap (twice that size in winter) calves bergs, some as big as London, the largest recorded 60 miles long, which drift through the most turbulent seas in the world; no land-based vertebrate inhabits the southernmost continent, because nothing can live on it apart from breeding penguins and seals; the seas freeze into great ...”

“... in a rambling old house in the country with secret passages, or, more often, in a tall terrace in London, with high dark rooms full of untidy piles of books and wildly interesting – more interesting than my parents – grown-ups. I felt more at home in that world than I did in the one I was required to inhabit, which seemed lacklustre and ordinary, and the ...”

“... later, when Jeremy Bentham decided he wanted to sit for ever in a glass case at University College London, the embalmer’s art was still in its infancy, which is why Bentham’s head is made of wax and the real one is still in a jar. Embalming took off in the US during the Civil War because of the vast distances bodies had to travel without refrigeration. The ...”

“... his monumental biography of De Gaulle, Jean Lacouture describes a meeting of the Free French in London in 1941 at which several of the younger members expressed their admiration for Churchill. In response De Gaulle warned them ‘never to forget that within him breathes the soul of Pitt’. What he meant was that every true Englishman is, at least ...”

“... unannounced ambition was to turn the event into the biggest piece of revolutionary street theatre London had ever seen.’ The first Rock Against Racism Carnival was held in Victoria Park on 30 April 1978; it was RAR’s breakthrough moment. The organisers had hoped ten thousand people would attend, but in the event a hundred thousand came to hear bands ...”