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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... much about what Lisa Cohen has called ‘the close-knit, fractious lesbian networks of New York, London and Paris’: from Eva to Allanah to Esther to Evelyn and then Eda, with many side projects and much criss-crossing, as Allanah darts off with Eda and then Jane, around the same time Esther is dallying with Joan, who is Eda’s ex. It’s a ...”

“... English cuppa just to watch it die. The ad was illustrated by a picture of a teacup with a union jack-tagged teabag nestled in a bouquet of patriotic souvenirs – a red double-decker bus, an old-fashioned black cab, an old-fashioned red phone box, a Big Ben. Threatening this pot-pourri of Englishness was a clenched fist, blue like the European ...”

“... most dangerous opiates in 1956 – which he managed with a course at Yerbury Dent’s clinic in London, aided by a loan from his parents – allowed him to speak with a persuasive moral authority in his preface to Naked Lunch. It also gave him a new lease of life (‘since the cure I been sexy as an 18-year-old and healthy as a rat.’). The ...”

“... of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay Khadka, by – of all people – Jack Straw. Within a few days, hospital closures had been suspended, as had the privatisation of High Street post offices. None of it earth-shattering, much of it largely symbolic, but combined with the shifts in government style and culture, the initial effect ...”

“... Harvest E.M. Forster had the idea of doing a kind of anonymous life of a young man in Regency London, quoting Keats’s letters and describing his hopes and fears and his family and financial troubles, but not mentioning him by name. It brought the actual Keats, before the legend began, very close. Barnard’s treatment has something of the same ...”

“... that the reader should see him. And here we are very much in the dark: not for nothing has Ian Jack, its meticulous editor, noted that ‘Wuthering Heights is one of the most enigmatic of English novels.’ Much depends on how Emily Brontë imagined her hero, as well as very skilfully creating him, and covering her authorial tracks. I would say that as a ...”

“... and especially after it, the book lasted. I read it for the first time in 1980, en route to London to talk to the punk group Gang of Four and the singer Lora Logic, and it was as if the story I was after was right in my lap, the complete punk critique of council tenancies, deathly entertainment, ‘at home he feels like a tourist,’ ‘God save ...”

“... and beyond the horizon of both, but casting visible shadows, lies the outer darkness, the world of Jack Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, in which women were described and rated like horses: ‘Perfectly sound in wind and limb. A fine Brown girl rising nineteen . . . Fit for High Keeping with a Jew Merchant.’ When Wellington left Wilson to go off to ...”

“... December 1824, the battle that clinched independence. Bolívar liked his British officers: a Union Jack catches the eye in the fresco that adorns the Pantheon in Caracas, where his remains now lie. Quite apart from his military genius, Bolívar was, in his own way, an impressive political thinker, and expressed his ideas in a lucid prose that is still a ...”

“... announces poetic moments, the halo of hush around beauty. McBride is closer in her aesthetic to Jack Butler Yeats than to William, with her preference for smudges and streaks, abrupt smears of language, her avoidance of the sort of brush-stroke that vanishes, its job done, into the likeness of the thing represented. Her prose has a tactile, built-up ...”

“... defence was that it was an old family code and that the letters simply gave an account of life in London. She, too, was convicted. Who knows what vital information could be recorded in a sketch or a piece of knitting? These were the years when soup adverts on telegraph poles were thought to contain messages to German spies, and parties of volunteers were ...”

“... in ostentatious disdain for elected office a good wheeze for wringing out votes. In the 2000 London mayoral election, he was again able to exploit popular resentment, this time of political jobbery, after Millbank had chopper-dropped Frank Dobson in as the official Labour candidate. To his credit, Mullin recognises the tackiness of this fixing ...”