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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... days. For the next half an hour, the members of the community of Walford – the fictional East London borough where the show is set – are introduced to us one by one: who will take responsibility for this unloved ‘cantankerous’ old man nobody could give a ‘toss about’? Lou Beale, Albert Square’s matriarch and one of its main ...”

“... Evidences that Strike You, of our British Constitution in the Streets of the World’s Metropolis, London, Londres, London?’ The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether understand . . . ‘It merely referred,’ Mr Podsnap explained, with a sense of meritorious proprietorship, ‘to Our ...”

“... friends’ bands whose gigs I used occasionally to go to in the basements and back rooms of North London pubs was an indie guitar group called Keane. One Friday night in the early summer of 2001 at the Monarch on Chalk Farm Road, my girlfriend gave their manager (an ex-boyfriend of hers) a couple of quid for a homemade CD. ‘That’ll be worth a lot of money ...”

“... bastard and then we both cried and made up. We decided the three of us might have to run away to London Town before the summer. My friends had never met David Sylvian, but that didn’t prevent them from inventing a planet where they all could live happily together, in a distant universe just for David and Fiona and Katherine, where the words Duran Duran ...”

“... premature suburban Mod. Raworth, uniquely, is both Ted and Mod: the rock’n’roll romanticism of Jack Kerouac with the unblinking stamina of the Soho cruiser; jazz and flash tailoring. ‘I learned to always strike the first blow when the tension mounts . . . and once that’s done, to never relax the pressure.’ Too much time on railway platforms, an ...”

“... a curious detail of recent regulatory history – the granting of official ‘forest’ status to London in 2002. Designed to place London’s parklands under the safeguard of the Forestry Commission, the decree neatly epitomises the way urban societies have come to think of woodlands (and of wilderness more generally) as ...”

“... as in one of his wartime masterpieces, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’. The death of a little girl in the bombing is at once terrible and a liberation from getting old: Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of ...”

“... You slept a lot sounder knowing that Bujak was on your street. This was 1980. I was living in London, West London, carnival country, what the police there call the front line. Dr Alimantado, Sons of Thunder, Race War, No Future: dry thatched dreadlocks, the scarred girls in the steeped pubs. Those black guys, they ...”

“... In​ the autumn of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon ...”

“... fact that, during his trial, Thomas Venner led an insurrection of militant Fifth Monarchy men in London, thus bringing all nonconformists under suspicion. Bunyan’s first wife, whose name has never been recorded, had died, leaving him four children. His second wife, Elizabeth, courageous and pious like his first, presented a petition to secure his ...”

“... I hoped to locate the grave of my great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, 1st/17th (County of London) Battalion (Poplar and Stepney Rifles), the London Regiment, who had died in the war and was buried near Amiens. Facts about him are scarce. My grandmother, whose only brother he was, has been dead now for twenty ...”