“... Dickens as he did. Long out of print, his life is now reissued by Cambridge University Press to mark Dickens’s bicentenary. John Sutherland has added them up: there have now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete ...”

“... the new apartments. In 1967, the Democratic National Committee took over the sixth floor of the 11-storey office building. Here, on the night of 17 June 1972, five burglars were caught trying to plant a bug. The group comprised an electronics expert, James McCord, and four Cuban-Americans from Miami. It didn’t take the police and the FBI long to discover ...”

“... and its first television cartoon series, Astro Boy (known in Japan as ‘Iron-Arm Atom’), mark the poles of public sentiment in this early period of nuclear power. Godzilla, made in late 1954 in direct response to the Bikini incident, depicts a monster born of the hydrogen bomb who breathes radioactive fire. But it also shows Tokyo being saved from ...”

“... its distant, sunlit hill; on one side of the road is a pub, the Adam and Eve, on the other a four-storey inn-cum-brothel, with whores leaning out of every sash window and looking down on the mayhem in the street below. During the Jacobite invasion of 1745, this is where soldiers were required to muster prior to marching off to the encampment on Finchley ...”

“... otherwise is, as Harryboy Boas says in Alexander Baron’s novel The Lowlife (1963), ‘the mark of the outsider’. Rather, Hackney is the first step out, geographically and socially, ‘a Victorian-Edwardian suburb swallowed up by London, broad streets, little villas and big tradesmen’s houses; and now, among these, little factories and workshops ...”

“... but most of his belongings are still in Skyline. He can see it from his new balcony, a seven-storey block faced in timber and what looks like red brick but is, in fact, cladding, backed by combustible insulation. It was built seventeen years ago. Invisible from the street is the unusual interior, a courtyard with a glass roof. The only way in and out of ...”

“... Todd’s careful reconstruction of Delaney’s background and childhood shows just how wide of the mark this is. Yes, Delaney was solidly working class, born in Salford in 1938 to Joseph Delaney, a bus driver of Irish extraction, and his wife, Elsie Twemlow, the daughter of millworkers. Yes, they moved around: Shelagh, her mother and her grandmother to a flat ...”

“... transferred excessive loads to the remaining columns. As these loads became unsustainable, one storey collapsed on the next in a ‘pancake’ effect. The towers were designed to cope with the obvious threats, such as earth tremors and strong winds, but, like the Lusitania, were almost defenceless against something novel. To focus on the technology of ...”

“... used as a refuse tip. It appeared he had fallen from the wooden balcony that ran around the upper storey of the castle. There was a drop of six canne (about thirteen metres) into the warren. Part of the balcony had collapsed: one could see splintered wood, though the gap looked small for the bulky Count to have fallen through. Ladders were fetched. Three or ...”

“... all around you were either slaving away or – worse – out of work would have been sufficient to mark you out as a ‘lady’. What could be grander than lounging around upstairs, nibbling at the stock when the fancy took you, brushing out your curls? She and Katie would still spend hour upon hour getting ready to go out – to Cardiff, or to Pontypridd, to ...”

“... had closed and a rash of new housing was spreading across the area. No. 65 was a typical three-storey house of sooty grey London brick, with a thin garden out back and a pub nearby on the corner (the Giraffe, named after a popular attraction at the Surrey Gardens Zoo). The railway passed close to the back of the house: the busy London-Dover line. Here ...”

“... not much younger than the city itself – two centuries – and reaching to the top of the nine-storey regional administration building. In March, a Russian missile punched a seven-storey hole through the building, killing 37 and wounding 34. Visiting journalists are taken to marvel at the hole, a memorial to something ...”

“... the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his operations out of a two-storey building on Main Street, where the thugs of his Ready-Mixed Cement Corporation were dispatched to buy votes, steal ballot boxes, kidnap candidates or gun down whomever, to keep him kingmaker. The Goats’ capture of local tax revenue partly depended on the ...”

“... I reflect that there isn’t much swearing in my plays. I imagine the characters in a play by Mark Ravenhill, say, get through more ‘fucks’ in the first five minutes than there are in my entire oeuvre. The first time I wrote ‘fuck’ in a script was in my second play, Getting On, and Kenneth More, who was the star (and swore all the time ...”

“... of new private homes built each year didn’t go up. It barely budged from the 150,000 a year mark. The market failed. There was increasing demand without increasing supply. Mid-boom, as the imbalance between the number of people chasing a house and the supply of new homes reached a tipping point, average house prices took off like a rocket, trebling ...”