“... or staging unexpected new plays anonymously. The revelation that he was the author of The Lady of Lyons proved so humiliating to the Times in 1838 that it retaliated with an attack which W.C Macready called ‘vulgar, virulent and impotent from its display of malice’. Bulwer-Lytton was thought too delicate for education at Eton, and was tutored at home ...”

“... hard and keen like a hunting animal.’ Here Leo’s daimon is adapting and echoing the words of John Pory, who in 1600 published an English translation of the historical Leo’s La Descrittione dell’ Africa: ‘How many desolate cold mountains and huge drie, and barren deserts passed he? How often was he in hazard to have been captived, or to have had his ...”

“... to extend a particular programme of preventive medicine to the world outside the West. Maryinez Lyons describes (in Aids and the Epidemics of History) the misguided campaigns against sleeping sickness conducted by colonial authorities anxious to prevent decimation of the labour pool, but un-aware that it was the European intervention itself and resultant ...”

“... have descended on us. Their hoofbeats are still ringing in our ears.’ Three months later John Dos Passos reported in Life magazine that the Americans were ‘losing the victory in Europe’. Visiting Germany as an army journalist, he found that Europeans, ‘friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are ...”

“... prostitutes against their working conditions in 1975, when they organised a sit-in in a church in Lyons. But the Catch 22 to be described seems to be much the same in both countries. The schizoid aspect of the life-style and of society’s attitude to it is reflected in legislation. Briefly, while prostitution is not illegal, any action which leads to its ...”

“... off the coldest winter this century by loitering for as long as possible in the Underground and in Lyons Corner Houses. Nor did the Windrush trigger a massive influx of new immigrants. Scarcely more than a thousand drifted across the Atlantic over the next five years. Ambitious West Indians found it cheaper to sail to the United States, where they had been ...”

“... were well known for their helpfulness to female patrons. Feminists championed the ABC teashops and Lyons Corner Houses, which began to appear in the 1870s and 1880s, claiming that they provided women with the opportunity to participate in London’s cultural, intellectual, professional and political life. With the rise of public transport, women were ...”

“... taken so completely for granted at the time that they are usually lost to history: the supper at Lyons Salad Bowl; the possibility, if feeling nervous before a doctor’s appointment, of chain-smoking in the waiting room; the difficulty of deciding when to buy a house at a time when property prices are falling by 6 per cent a year. At the other end are the ...”

“... travel for ‘ladies’). This absence is exacerbated in the recent reprints, which have retained John Craxton’s characteristic cover designs, but omitted the arresting black and white photographs taken by Joan that were included in the first editions. Despite all this, Mani and Roumeli remain extraordinarily engaging books. This is partly thanks to Leigh ...”

“... Hippolyte Taine pointed out that London was more than twice the size of Paris and equal to ten Lyons or 12 Marseilles. (Glasgow, it should be said, was even more dominant in Scotland than London was in England.) Professional soccer required not just a few large towns, but leagues able to draw regular large crowds in 20, 40 and, ultimately, 92 large ...”

“... whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature is concerned’, who had ‘the tinker’s power of reaching the heart’ – there is a hint of rural ...”

“... The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t seek to inhabit his subject’s inner life or to assimilate him into his own ...”

“... historians to be found at the University of Lyon (which Hitchens insists on misspelling as Lyons) who believe that the Holocaust was a hoax got up to blacken Hitler’s good name. Not surprisingly, Faurisson and his friends are deeply unpopular, and Chomsky merely wrote in support of his right to publish his views like anyone else. Hitchens does a good ...”

“... pantheon. But unlike such Oxford contemporaries as Trevor-Roper, Maurice Bowra or even John Sparrow, all of whom have been well served in recent biographies, Cobb was never a college head, and this may go some way to explaining his subsequent eclipse. It was a role for which he was epically unsuited, given his (very un-French) disdain for ...”

“... 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a disused factory whose chimney ...”