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“... 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 ...”

“... His first major narrative work, Sweet Violets (2012), was a Grand Guignol ballet about Jack the Ripper and his victims. There were too many ill-defined characters and the plot was chaotic. Hansel and Gretel (2013) and The Age of Anxiety (2014) had similar problems. Meanwhile, the pure dance pieces he created for other companies, such as Viscera ...”

“... work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which there were more than a million by the end of the ...”

“... the last rag and bone cart – it’s a sight that disappeared without fanfare. Growing up in West London close to the M4 I would see hitchhikers all the time, and by my late teens I was one of them. The first ride out of town usually dropped me at a motorway service station in the West Country, or on the outskirts of Bristol. At popular spots – the Gordano ...”

“... attracted major politicians. Labour heavyweights, such as Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, stayed in London; even Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, decided after a term in the Scottish Parliament that he preferred to abandon Edinburgh for the clubbability of Westminster. More significantly, after only a year as first minister of the devolved Scottish ...”

“... to our spight. You of one Orpheus, sure have read, Who would like you have writ, Had he in London town been bred, And Polish’d to his wit. But he (poor soul) thought all was well, And great shou’d be his Fame, When he had left his Wife in Hell, And Birds and Beasts cou’d tame. Yet vent’ring then with scoffing rhimes The Women to ...”