“... 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 ...”

“... lived and worked as an adult in lots of places, most significantly downtown Manhattan, San Diego, London and San Francisco, with long spells of gigging and episodes of sudden geographical flight. In her lifetime she published eight or 13 or more novels – it depends how you count them – since supplemented with a substantial Nachlass. For a time, she was ...”

“... from studio manager to the rank of outside broadcast producer, he spent his early years, in London and then in Birmingham, producing anything and everything: from seaside summer shows and circuses to race meetings and general election counts, from Muffin the Mule to the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. Rejecting a good financial offer to move ...”

“... an Australian of British stock will have more in common with a Chinese Australian than with his London cousin. These problems of definition demand precision and subtlety at the same time that they promote extravagance and assertion. Murray tends, I suppose, to extravagance and assertion. Where questions of identity arise he writes always confidently and ...”

“... far more airtime than the demise of a major scientist or philosopher. In the world of the media, a Jack Benny or an Eamonn Andrews are far bigger men than Sartre. Similarly, the media are a thousand times more interested in Dallas and Dynasty, Coronation Street and Eastenders, than in anything that actually happens in Texas, let alone working-class Liverpool ...”

“... joining, for example, the élite Porcellian Club. Yes, it was banking next: Lazard Frères, in London. But then things changed. In poor health, ‘Fuzzy’ collapsed at work, and was invalided out of big business, to rest at the English country home of an American friend. The friend was one Charles de Forest, another Grotonian. At the ...”

“... breath at the helm. All the same, I had an impression of my great-uncle as a soused salt, a jolly jack tar. The loss of the Applegarth had just been a balls-up, it seemed. I was only the latest in a long line of people to slander Les. In time, I found out that the drinking June had mentioned was one of the rumours which swept the river after the loss of the ...”

“... profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad Bomber: He’s symmetrically built … neither fat nor skinny … a co-operative worker … punctual and neatly dressed … a ...”

“... All of them were Oxbridge-educated, and enjoyed significant patronage from the BBC and the smart London weeklies. In the early 1950s, before they were at all well known, most of them had work published in the Listener and the New Statesman, and Blake Morrison calculated (in his 1980 study of the group, The Movement) that between June 1953 and July 1956 ...”

“... the lights went out. To dance through the Blitz was to cock a snook at Hitler; in November 1941, a London dance hall was in full swing when suddenly a heavy thud shuddered through the sprung maple floor. Crashing of glass followed … On the music dais the pianist shot off his stool. The trombone player’s silver instrument flew from his hand across the ...”