“... 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 ...”

“... in Vienna just before the war, whose mother lives in Johannesburg and who themselves have adopted London. The very slightly older twin, a retiring museum curator, presents the life of the other, Fabrice, a poet incapable of finishing a piece of work, and suffering from Lowell-like bouts of insanity, who, prior to yet another hospitalisation, leaves his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on remaining a club for men of the world, the Quintin Hoggs and the Waldegraves, who came up from London on Friday evenings to hobnob with the professors and the misfits. The fact that it was a club more than a college was the ruin of many of the fellows. Think of Isaiah Berlin, who early in life settled for the career of an essayist, of a middlebrow giving ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”