“... 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 ...”

“... more exalted circumstances; next week for instance she is accompanying the Italian president to London to meet Jack Straw and she also translated for Bush on his visit to Italy last year. The library at the British Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young ...”

“... at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones of the Transport Workers, Hugh Scanlon of the Engineers and Vic Feather, the recently elected TUC General Secretary. The hours of argument circled round the Government’s need – political as much as economic – for legally enforceable constraints ...”

“... character in the Henry VI plays (1590-92) is not an honourable warrior but the populist rebel Jack Cade, who has Lord Saye beheaded because ‘he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor.’ The xenophobic rhetoric favoured by Cade is assigned to another repulsive character in the last of this sequence of histories, Richard III (1593), when before ...”

“... Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred or so of these subscribers had been the subjects or recipients of ...”

“... how he thought he’d never leave it, and then telling me stories of his life now, as a beggar in London. He tapped my arm: ‘Times’s bad,’ he said, ‘but good times is just around the corner.’George talked a lot about time; mainly he spoke of how it went too slow. He was 70, sleeping most nights at the Bondway emergency night-shelter in ...”

“... yobbos beating up the Bogside Papists. The Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland, Jack Lynch, appealed to the UN and said, evidently referring to the Irish Army: ‘We will not stand by.’ The wise knew what Lynch meant: we will huff and puff and do nothing. Fools thought he meant – and Unionists in the North pretended to think he meant ...”

“... book, nothing Veorah says could surprise the reader, short of verbatim quotations from Hansard or Jack the Ripper’s diaries. It will scarcely come as a shock to reveal that realism is not Fullalove’s mode, but the book still hankers after some of realism’s effects. The author wants his expressionism, and the obsessions he explores through his ...”

“... possibly the only copy – of Bacon’s essays. ‘If he was lost at sea,’ he had promised the London dealer, ‘the Bacon would go down clasped to his heart.’ In keeping with common ideas of the behaviour of the very rich, the Titanic cookbook explains that the A la Carte restaurant, whose food and service were superior even to the first-class ...”

“... didn’t take, choosing Dean Rusk instead. At Graham’s suggestion, Bruce became Ambassador in London, and before very long Graham was badgering Kennedy to sack Rusk and give the job to Bruce. Philip Graham was hyperactive. Kennedy made him chairman of the ground-breaking satellite company, Comsat. He wrote speeches for both the Kennedy brothers and for ...”

“... 1651, in the last battle before Charles II fled abroad. Urquhart, with many others, was taken to London as a prisoner, where, apparently, he determined to recover his freedom and his estates by using his pen. His first effort was a genealogy in which he names and describes his ancestors, going back to Adam. They were a notable line, and distinguished in ...”

“... have been,’ Wharton loyally assures us. But the war came to an end and Wharton had to return to London, where Thomson found him a job writing scripts about the Luddites for the BBC Schools Programme: ‘Our children are starvin’! Smash the frames! Aye, smash the devil’s frames!’ The trouble with his BBC associates was that they were stubbornly soft on ...”

“... ran: We are practically wiped out but we charged and took the Hun trenches yesterday. I stopped a Jack Johnson with my head, and my skull is slightly cracked. But I’m getting on splendidly. I did awfully well. Grenfell died slowly enough from the shell-splinter for his family to rush over and attend. His mother read him poems and Euripides’s ...”

“... Toots Shor’s in the West Fifties, when the shades were drawn and the jock talk was of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Damon Runyon (never of broads, Kahn tells us). Heroes of the book are the Life team who adopted the ‘rougher’ style of journalism in the Fifties and helped to drive the Jostler into retirement, or the reporters who tracked down Joe and ...”

“... going to have a stroke – they were laughing so much.’ These incongruously merry souls were Jack Fingleton and Bill O’ Reilly, both of whom had played in Test Matches under Bradman in the Thirties and had had their run-ins with him. They were both fine players, O’ Reilly especially, as a bowler of unpleasantly quick leg-breaks, and they had come ...”