“... 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 ...”

“... been marked by several new approaches to the reign that gave us the King James Bible, the Union Jack and Bonfire Night. ‘Four centuries is too long for anyone to remain in rehab,’ Clare Jackson writes in The Mirror of Great Britain. She sets out ‘neither to valorise nor to denigrate’ her subject, ‘but rather to restore appreciation of the sheer ...”

“... 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 ...”