“... new interwar housing type, the ‘bedsitting room’. When her older sister Nancy got one in London, she was first jealous and then dismayed when Nancy gave it up. The rising tide of underclothes had been too much: ‘I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away.’ Even by the standards of the time, the Mitfords’ childhood was removed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”