“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the splices are expert, and there are only a few repetitions. Raban is interesting everywhere, in London as in Florida; he carries around that Martian perspective, using it, for instance, on the condoms that used to festoon the trees beside the river at Putney ‘like pale bulbous fruits’; they’d disappeared when he checked, perhaps because of the pill or ...”

“... we know that in exactly the same year in which the Thirteen Colonies declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the 20,000 pounds reward (from Parliament in London) for the discovery of the ...”

“... in many ways the most accomplished piece. In mid-Fifties Cumberland the carefully-named Jack Spade lords it over his small household, enchanting his grandson and being unrelievedly cruel to his wife. Murray is unafraid of sentiment, and has a practised eye for the totemic value that can be placed on the most mundane of objects – a box of coloured ...”

“... frantic valedictory feeling: ‘good furniture’, ‘good paintings’, ‘such a good part of London’, ‘The black risotto is outstanding, if you like good things.’ His protagonists are people of the utmost discrimination, and yet they are able to take correspondingly little comfort from it. If anything, it seems to be a further source of danger to ...”

“... the immediate postwar years greatly enlivened its near-moribund exhibition programme and aided London’s gradual takeover from Paris as a centre for the international art market. Simultaneously, an increase in art education and art publishing offered further proof of Britain’s postwar vitality. The Whitechapel Art Gallery became a major venue after ...”