“... 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 ...”

“... and a belief, along with Williams, that American modernism should be relocated from Paris and London to the US. Asked to edit an issue of Poetry in 1931, Zukofsky put them together, along with Williams, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, Kenneth Rexroth and a stylistically random collection of others (including the young Whittaker Chambers), under the rubric of ...”

“... quite at the front, he passed the time in training, in hospital with bronchitis, or hanging around London using his lieutenant’s uniform to pick up women. Others might write of the horrors of trench warfare but Wheatley was inspired to write a romantic novel, Julie’s Lovers, which was rejected by Cassell. More important so far as his literary development ...”

“... of Samuel Joseph, who capped a successful business career with a less happy term as Lord Mayor of London during the Second World War. For Keith Joseph, born in 1918 and himself a product of Harrow and Oxford, Bovis was not only an inspiring model of entrepreneurship: it was a milch cow allowing him to function as a political grandee. He hung on to his shares ...”

“... for piano keys, and elephants themselves were exported – among them Jumbo, who was sent to London Zoo and then sold to Barnum and Bailey’s circus in America. Khartoum’s traders and freebooters raided for slaves, or played divide-and-rule among the people of the southern forests and marshes, buying captives for their own plantations along the river ...”

“... appeared to be enjoying a similar impunity. Then, suddenly, in October 1998 he was arrested in London for human rights abuses and detained in Britain until March 2000. The book retells this familiar saga, aiming to add new elements and interpretations. Again, Sands reveals a personal stake. The DINA’s murder of his relation Carmelo Soria was one of the ...”

“... corruption’. Morgan was found with an axe in his head in the car park of a South London pub frequented by police officers. Despite four murder investigations and an inquest, no one has been convicted of the crime. In September 2021, a court ruled that the historic practice of sending undercover officers to spy on protest movements – carried ...”

“... can at last be studied properly. There is no more attractive a figure of the civil wars than this London merchant who, even when he got mixed up with the Levellers in the later 1640s, resisted all the temptations to self-righteousness and to blind partisanship that the Revolution offered. His family, his library and his garden preserved his sense of ...”

“... Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building in London has begun business, to predictable complaints. A Guardian journalist asking for off-the-cuff comments from underwriters found them grumpy – the only appreciative voice was foreign and female. That is not surprising: the new Lloyd’s is an architectural statement of un-English vehemence ...”