“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and retyping binges carried out by willing accomplices – Sinclair Beiles, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso – brought order to the mass of nightmare scripts left in cupboards and drawers. Suitcases were abandoned when Burroughs flitted. Famous for his greyscale anonymity, Burroughs was the invisible man time-trapped in a thousand ...”

“... fit, weathered, narrow-eyed, skin creased and printed like a proper manuscript of mortality. Jack Kerouac, in The Dharma Bums (1958), took Snyder, in the person of Japhy Ryder, as the second American hero of his open-form mythology, a scholar-poet of the mountains and the Pacific west, after Neal Cassady’s transcontinental road ...”

“... and Eliot, as Miller himself insists time and again, spent much time, both in Boston and London, in circles where straight, gay and bi mingled freely. And it’s a bizarre sort of literary criticism that makes the act of alluding to the work of another writer mean you share their sexual preferences, particularly when the poem in question is a ...”

“... reluctant to marry her husband, the statesman better known as Lord John Russell (or ‘Finality Jack’) than as the First Earl Russell, for he was 48 to her 25 when they married in 1841, and nobody supposed she ever loved the man to whom she dutifully bore four children. She did her duty – in Griffin’s nice phrase, ‘She seems to have thought of her ...”

“... sort of thing about others, while characteristically mingling it with self-disgust: ‘Back in London met Princess Bibesco and did not care for her much, her egoism is as tiresome and her appearance about as unprepossessing as my own.’ Evelyn Waugh being ‘our valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at Evelyn’s “provincial little ...”

“... painter and fine artist. CineContact like showing art, part of the buzz, the mood of the moment in London: intertextuality, pleasure and profit. The tedious limbo of the corridor, the waiting-room, the outer office, is also an opportunity to take in complimentary product. A gallery is anywhere with wall space and a price list. It doesn’t have to be a white ...”

“... true murderer. In the midst of this chaos of clues came the one man who could make sense of it, Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard. At the time of the Road Hill murder, detectives were still a relatively recent invention, like ‘the camera, the electric telegraph and the railway train’. Whicher was one of the original Scotland Yard detective ...”

“... It has been suggested that the ripper might be projecting onto horses the impulses that drove Jack the Ripper (or the Yorkshire Ripper) to rape women. But horses aren’t women – or are they? In the Indo-European world, the horse is a symbol of lawless animal passion. City children usually catch their first glimpse of the mating game when they see dogs ...”