“... before it destroys you,’ Elizavyeta tells him. The lovers have an idyllic Easter in London. Accident, and a failure of nerve, lead to Scott’s remaining a village schoolmaster, finally unable to break free from the role into which history has cast him. He marries May and fathers the author of the book. Scottish Puritanism is victorious, at ...”

“... Vice-President Bush was to head a special Crisis Management Team and he called up the columnist Jack Anderson on the telephone as early as November 1981 to complain about the ‘guerrilla war’ that was being waged against him from within the White House. As to the identity of his opponents, Haig still confesses his bafflement: ‘To me the White House was ...”

“... tessitura, in prose and verse. Once while living in Kennington he met two Oxford undergraduates, Jack Clark and Rodney Philips, who were interested in poetry: they ‘were in some disbelief that close to the Clark family house could actually reside a contributor to New Writing, as, in a way that now seems baffling, had been reported to them’. That ...”

“... discovered, not without a sense of relief, that I had inserted the microphone cord into the wrong jack on the tape recorder. Only my questions had been preserved. A friend suggested I should just have asked: ‘Why are you a monster?’ For it is wonderfully apt that this particular interview should have crashed so spectacularly: Seidel is, as everyone ...”

“... Stuart’s story ends, or rather begins, with his stepping out in front of the 11.15 train from London to King’s Lynn (the ‘graveyard service’, as it has always been called by railway workers). With his death, the book has become a real murder mystery: how did he find himself in front of a 150-ton train? But this is a secondary question. The main ...”

“... to engage in such travels: he paid an official visit to Napoleon III in 1867, and spent time in London, Berlin and Vienna. He had therefore inspected the centres of other empires and would-be empires at close hand, and visited museums full of imperial loot and treasures. In 1876, Pedro II visited the United States for the Centennial Exposition in ...”

“... of the settlement he agreed to pay Samantha Geimer). In 1961 I was raped by an American in London. I was 14, a year older than the girl Polanski gave half a Quaalude and champagne to, then had oral, vaginal and anal sex with. In defence of Polanski, various people have pointed out Geimer was a teenage model and was doing a photo-shoot her mother had ...”

“... down that wasn’t a fucking war zone. They went to Glasgow and Birmingham and Liverpool and London and the Isle of Man. We were just the dirty Irish, filthy Tims, ignorant Micks, fucking daft Paddies, lower down the pecking order than blacks or dogs. And it kept happening, all over again. People were getting burned out their houses every day of the ...”

“... in counter-insurgency policing. They and the five hundred or so others like them at work in London represent a formal tradition of secret political policing which is almost as old as the institution of organised policing itself in Britain. Modern political policing began on Saint Patrick’s Day 1883, when four CID men and eight uniformed officers were ...”

“... his best, has been borrowed only four times since 1977 by the discriminating members of the London Library. Out of his 23 novels and books of stories, Penguin now offers only seven. That Nobel is over thirty Nobels old. By contrast, his Transatlantic fame as one of the world’s greatest novelists must be as secure as ever, especially within and ...”

“... from within it – and with a sense of humour entirely lacking in historical novelists.’ In London, Richard Ollard, an editor at Macmillan, was similarly impressed by O’Brian’s ‘originality, gusto and … really astonishing knowledge of the sources’. He was ‘a more than competent hand at characterisation’, Ollard, a former navy ...”

“... studying networks. How did everything connect? Surely it did in some way? Certain areas of London, certain prep schools, London shops (Harrods, for some reason, was considered a bit ‘common’, while Harvey Nichols was not), certain sports, clothes, even brands of aftershave: they all signified. There were ...”

“... and gush in print on behalf of TPOF (The Poor Old Führer), was already marshalling the Union Jack Shirts for her novel Wigs on the Green. But it was not until 1938 that P.G. Wodehouse brought on Sir Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts in The Code of the Woosters: ‘By the way, when you say “shorts”, you mean “shirts”, of course.’ ‘No. By ...”

“... as an Englishman by adoption. Their only effect has been further to alienate Brown and Labour in London from their Scottish supporters, thereby boosting the SNP’s chances in the forthcoming elections and, thus, compounding Brown’s predicament as a North Briton in English politics. This is a sad prospect. If Brown’s Scottishness is used by disgruntled ...”

“... Savoy Palace was burned to the ground and the lord chancellor’s head was placed on a spike over London Bridge. Yet it was a bit of royal flash that put an end to the revolt. Richard was able to palm off the rebels with vague promises of pardons and reform, before confronting Wat Tyler during negotiations at Smithfield. The Lord Mayor of ...”