“... books; and it was hard to tell how much he understood. If you wrote a very simple sentence – ‘Jack and Mary went to the supermarket on Wednesday to buy sausages’ – followed by such questions as, ‘Who went to the supermarket?’ ‘When did they go?’ ‘What did they buy?’, he was unable to answer by pointing to the appropriate words in the ...”

“... never rains. These films were ubiquitous in my youth; I can still recall every glint and gleam of Jack Nicholson’s dodgy grin as he frolicked across the beach with – and I wish I had a better descriptor – some young one.So what happens to an actress over the age of 45? Robbed of the big roles, she drinks, or goes mad, or does both at a great and ...”

“... disgrace’. (Nor does anyone want to be reminded of Mitt’s embarrassing performance at the London Olympics.) He cannot be praised as a ‘patriot’, when he avoided the Vietnam War by becoming a Mormon missionary for two years among the barbaric tribes of France (and where, typical of his social skills, he did not manage to convert a single ...”

“... book, Hallock admits that ‘he was probably never directly made aware of the molly subculture in London.’ I would have said this was a virtual certainty, though unprovable. Given that, the best we can say about Margaret is that it is a woman’s name. Commenting on a ‘campy’ letter to Halleck from a male friend, Hallock locks on the sentence ‘When I ...”

“... order’. He wrote on ‘narrow strips of paper, pasted into long rolls’ (a more fastidious Jack Kerouac), allowing the narrative to flow unchecked by page breaks. The ‘music’ of words obsessed him; in the early story ‘Berenice’, Ackroyd notes ‘the melodies of Poe’s prose’ and ‘his consummate control of cadence and of open vowel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him ...”

“... of his life was spent at the margins of power, first as the rebel leader of anti-Vichy forces in London and Algiers, and then, between 1946 and his return to office in 1958, as a brooding absence in French political life. Removing himself from view the better to be seen was both a tactic and a strategy, as Sudhir Hazareesingh argues in a fascinating study of ...”

“... Mozambique’ and is one of the three original long poems in the book. Datelined ‘Tokyo 1942 – London 1946’, it should now be seen, I think, as one of the outstanding poems of the war, even though it is less concerned with fighting than with just sitting around waiting. Exiles traditionally eat bitter bread, but the narrator is more concerned to reflect ...”

“... cases and tripod of a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less ...”

“... the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin literary men’ with the family. He later wrote of ‘the Britisher’s jealousy of art and artists, which is generally dormant but called into activity when the artist has gone outside his field ...”

“... I think it more likely that Orwell, an old Etonian and a writer who, in Down and Out in Paris and London, worries that his accent will instantly discover him as a gentleman, is transferring his own attitudes to Kipling. After all, Orwell is not a reliable reader of Kipling’s poetry: faced with the dove-tailed ironies of ‘The Winners’, its ...”

“... the criminal biographies that make up Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices, a poor apprentice (like Jack Shepherd, the apprentice-turned-criminal whose case he considers) was tied into a situation with no future. For Rawlings, the biographies of 18th-century criminals fulfilled important functions of explanation and negotiation; they acted as a warning to the ...”

“... and the poster-paint. And I took part in a good-sized punch-up outside the American Embassy in London, thus disproving (as a pamphlet of the time pointed out) Lady Bracknell’s piercing words in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to ...”

“... was already routine: British visitors making crawling Stalinist speeches, Chinese guests in London insulting Labour MPs as tools of Wall Street imperialism. Instead, Zhou went for the Labour Party (now in opposition), although its leadership was fiercely opposed to Communism at home and abroad and was soon to commit its reluctant membership to ...”