“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and parochial academic tradition of which Leavis was the major school marm. ‘When I am in London, I live effectively as an exile. As a radical intellectual, I am always on the margins, on the outside, looking in.’Peter Fuller wrote this in 1975. By the end, he had joined the club. At the time of his death in a road accident on 28 April 1990, he was ...”

“... and then his second novel. Eventually they did print his short stories. He was living in North London. He was married, probably being kept by his wife, who was a teacher. I edited his books and we became great friends. The other thing that bore fruit during my time at Deutsch was the Jean Rhys saga. I’d always thought her books were wonderful. I showed ...”

“... the articles he wrote for the Kenyan press kept him in the public eye, and his studies at the London School of Economics under Bronislaw Malinowski resulted in Facing Mount Kenya, his book on the customs and practices of the Kikuyu, which gave him academic credentials. Kenyatta had his feet firmly in both the traditionalist and the modernist camps, and he ...”

“... of mine in Grand Street, and was a friend of Edward Said’s, whom I knew when I worked at the London Review.) On the day of the dinner she phoned to say that her cook had broken her arm so the dinner would be in a restaurant called Basta Pasta on 17th Street. I thought that sounded like the kind of place my friend Sam and I would find insufficiently grand ...”

“... from finding refuge in Britain. (Echoes of Balfour’s resistance to the Eastern hordes persist in Jack Straw’s ‘bogus asylum seekers’, Tony Blair’s call for the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to be rewritten, and John Townend’s complaint about the ‘mongrelisation’ of Britain.) Balfour warned Parliament that the Jews ...”