“... 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 ...”

“... The sequel to the elopement and marriage was marked by tragedy. Romilly and Mitford returned to London, to a house in Docklands, where their first baby died in a measles epidemic. Soon after, in 1939, they moved to the United States, prompted in part, according to Hons and Rebels, by a vast utility bill. ‘No one had ever explained to me that you had to ...”

“... 37 per cent of voters considered Trump qualified to be president, so as the constitutional lawyer Jack Balkin put it, somebody had to tell Republicans that ‘although Trump is an unqualified son of a bitch, at least he is their unqualified son of a bitch. He may be a sinner, but he is not the Antichrist.’ Just as Farage needed Johnson and Gove, Trump ...”

“... British pack. The history of war is now certainly more palatable to academia: King’s College, London has a very reputable Department of War Studies. This type of military history, contextualised, nuanced and empathic, is practised by women and men alike, essentially immune to the old glories and instead devoted to exposing the manifold pities of ...”

“... local WI branch is ‘a hotbed of hip, successful women’ and involves ‘an awful lot of A-list London networking’. This cosmopolitanism may be because Knight, as related in her 2003 book The Shops (a copy of which, I’m proud to say, I got for 50p from a charity shop in Peckham), is of Indian and Belgian parentage and lived in Brussels as a child, so ...”

“... Your Enemies (1993) and Heading Inland (1996), and a pair of novels concerned with working life in London, Reversed Forecast (1994), set in a Soho bookies, and Small Holdings (1995), about a privatised park in Palmers Green. After these came a succession of comedies marked by their energy, idiosyncrasy and eclecticism, featuring depressed, phobic or panicked ...”

“... was given an enhanced role in running the company when it restarted after the Second World War. As Jack Ewing says in Faster, Higher, Farther (2017), his eye-opening book about the company, ‘the Nazis had unwittingly laid the groundwork for one of the grandest experiments ever in worker-management co-operation.’This governing structure saw Volkswagen grow ...”

“... beneath the charming umbrage. Lovelace spirits this Primavera, or perhaps this Venus, to a London brothel, where he eventually drugs and rapes her. We had been brought to feel that she might have come to love him, in attempting to reform him, while Lovelace has acted from motives both of love and revenge – a teasing conspiratorial revenge which has ...”

“... shouted out: ‘Just start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth again.’ Frank Sinatra offered to set ...”

“... Silone, Czesław Miłosz; also George Orwell, never a communist, who contributed fifteen ‘London Letters’ during the war and whose memoir of his bedwetting schooldays, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, appeared in Partisan Review after his death.As Howe and Trilling later admitted, the New York intellectuals did not produce a great writer from within ...”

“... of André Malraux, then the minister of culture. As the dancers gathered at the airport to fly to London for the next leg of the tour, Nureyev was taken to one side and told that he would be flying back to Moscow instead. One by one the dancers came to say goodbye with tears in their eyes. Rudolf was distraught and told his French friends that he was a ...”

“... at Passchendaele has an austere, military character similar to that of the contemporary South London Underground stations Holden designed for the Northern Line extension to Morden. Holden and Edwin Lutyens, who couldn’t be omitted, are the only specimens whose reputations have endured or been successfully exhumed. There was no aesthetic agreement among ...”