“... 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 ...”

“... To the charge that More had an unnatural fondness for torture (when John Tewkesbury, a London leather merchant and Protestant, was incinerated after torture in 1531, More – by then lord chancellor – imagined ‘a hot firebrand burning at his back, that all the water of the world will never be able to quench’), one recent Catholic apologia ...”

“... and Nyasaland under the domination of the white-settler minority in Southern Rhodesia). Back in London, Tommy used the Aborigines’ Protection Society, founded in 1837, to help destroy the federation. It finally expired in 1963.The relevance of those two memories is that they underline a point Sathnam Sanghera keeps making in Empireworld. At the outset, he ...”

“... not in an art gallery but at the Arsenal cinema. Goldin reveres Visconti, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Jack Smith. Her images – I’m thinking of a self-portrait at a window, in which she has a curl at the nape of her neck and scratches on her exposed back – form part of an autobiographical narrative, one that reveals in order to keep battling against denial ...”

“... partly because it stimulated popular violence of the sort typified by the Kentish rising of 1450 (Jack Cade’s Rebellion), which resulted in the lynching of several leading ministers and increased the aura of incompetence around the king and his advisers. At the same time, it is hard to see the wars as a direct consequence of economic factors, or of ...”

“... of British Architects hosted a public meeting at which various contenders for the new office of London mayor were invited to argue their case for election. If the event remains memorable, it’s thanks largely to the Conservative candidate, Lord Archer, who betrayed no inkling of the perjury charges that would soon ditch his campaign and carry him off to ...”

“... Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved to learn that for our London debut the director has elbowed the offending cunnilingus and replaced it with a walk-down in kingly garb. It’s to be hoped this substitution doesn’t catch on generally or the sexual health of the nation might suffer accordingly. Goodbye.’ 15 ...”

“... to save her proved futile, but the mistakes were made at King’s College Hospital in South London, where she had been treated over the previous five weeks. Before my wife, Merope, and I left Great Ormond Street early in the morning on Tuesday, 31 August 2021, the consultant in charge of Martha told us he had been alarmed by her condition when she ...”

“... the avant-garde. As a heavyweight boxer, his career peaked in 1916, when he fought the formidable Jack Johnson in Barcelona. He lasted six rounds. These two strands of Cravan’s career are not as diverse as one might think: his stance as a writer was extremely combative – confrontation and ‘anti-art’ polemic were his métier. As the poet Mina Loy, who ...”

“... cottages, increasingly as designer rather than bodger. The process continued when he removed to London. Still impecunious but personable and an excellent dancer, he maintained both spirits and diet by means of the Edwardian weekend house-party, picking up cottage or small-house commissions almost as if they were dance-partners. Indeed in a round about ...”