“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... retained their true initials while obfuscating their sex and identity. Harry Patterson (‘Jack Higgins’) and Brian Garfield (‘Brian Wynne’) have adopted surnames which were, apparently, those of their mothers before they married. In one of the pseudonymously offered novels under review, Julian Barnes writes as ‘Dan Kavanagh’, having recently ...”

“... startups were founded by women in their thirties, and I’ve seen companies with all-female staff. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, who has access to the data of the billion or so Chinese consumers on the Taobao and Alipay platforms, says that ‘women are the economy, today and in the future.’ One recent report suggests that 79 per cent of technology firms ...”

“... of ‘buggers’ clubs’, and the good old English cognomen is all over Hansard.Some Men in London is rare among really good anthologies in containing a huge amount of rubbish. It is divided, broadly, into writings by the gays and by the anti-gays, and since the gays, through most of this period, had to keep things to themselves, it’s their opponents ...”

“... as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in the world’. Wilde, he wrote, was ‘charming, at the same time; unimaginable, and, above all, a very great personality … It’s impossible to gauge what is the young Lord’s ...”

“... the Stamford News, edited by the radical journalist John Scott, who was later to edit the London Magazine. The village of Helpston itself was caught between two landed and political interests: Burghley Park was the seat of the Exeters, who were Tories, while the Milton Estate belonged to the Fitzwilliams, who were Whigs. Clare’s horizon was set by ...”

“... contacts. Lord Deighton, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and chief executive of the London 2012 Olympics, was appointed ‘PPE tsar’ in April. The Cabinet Office minister Chloe Smith was a Deloitte consultant before becoming MP for Norwich North at the age of 27. The owner of a small consultancy recently told me what happened when he went to ...”

“... no one to explain on his behalf, in measured tones and lawyerly phrases, why he wanted to stay in London, so he shouted: ‘I do not want to go to Cardiff! I live in London. I want to be treated as a human being.’ He was sent back down to the cells pretty quickly. A man who’d punched a woman and her husband in the face ...”

“... musical Salad Days, the story of a pair of inane Cambridge graduate newly-weds living in London with a magic piano. It opened in the summer of 1954, a few months before I went up to Oxford, and featured a jolly song supposedly counselling against nostalgia called ‘We Said We’d Never Look Back’, any three bars of which bring back memories of ...”