“... glass vial containing the ‘Hair of Extinct Tasmanian Aboriginal’ at the Wellcome Collection in London, and looks at VR images of extinct species such as Steller’s sea cow and the smilodon (a sabre-toothed feline predator from the Pleistocene) at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris. Qureshi’s main target isn’t the libido sciendi that ...”

“... century Foote was England’s pre-eminent stage comic, the toast of the clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its ...”

“... Although the Conservatives picked up two seats on the Essex borders, their performance in Greater London was dire. Labour held seats like Enfield Southgate, Finchley, the two Harrow seats and Wimbledon with increased majorities, and from the figures it is hard to believe that many of its London seats were actually Tory in ...”

“... in local government and it is done mainly because of the political plaudits it earns locally’. London city centre is the most watched place on earth: to give you an idea, there are 96 cameras at Heathrow, 35 on Oxford Street, 260 at the Houses of Parliament, 1800 covering the main railway stations, 500 covering the Central Line alone, as many as a hundred ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... includes pictures from The Americans, from early days in his native Switzerland, pictures of London, frames from the movies he made – including Cocksucker, a never-released film about the Rolling Stones – and drawn-over and collaged photographs, on which texts have been scrawled. For all its rejection of the mendacious clarity of the classic picture ...”

“... sentencing of felons to America but also provided him with a theme for Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack. In these novels, she assures us, transportation is recommended as the ‘solution’ to the problems of criminality. Similarly, A Journal of the Plague Year is presented as a message of support for Walpole’s Quarantine Act. It is interesting to be told ...”

“... Minister’s continued insistence that he stop making public speeches which annoyed the City of London, drove him to reflect, as early as November 1975: ‘I am afraid that somehow, without quite knowing how it happens, I will slip into the position that I occupied between 1964 and 1970 when I went along with a lot of policies which I knew to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”