“... time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed). That is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the recent My Week with Marilyn could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what – in the aura that surrounds her – she was ...”

“... white hospital sheets were an approximation, I believed.Actually, the reality of the hospital in London was rather different, though the sheets were white. The near-demented Sister Winniki (identical twin of Big Nurse) always ripped the crisp white sheets off me at too early an hour in the morning, in the name of mental health. ‘Up, up, up, Mees ...”

“... drawings. It had been his 40-page pamphlet on an exhibition of Venetian paintings held in London in 1895, mowing down their grandiose attributions (especially the multiplying Giorgiones) with a critical scythe of glinting perspicacity, which had turned him overnight into the enfant terrible of the art world, the maker or breaker of ...”

“... of the talking, which is how it always used to be when I was a child. It was only when I got to London that the men started talking and the women fell silent. 8 August. A new strategy for not working: empty the fluff not only from the sieve on the dryer door, which is routine, but from the grilles on the machine itself. This involves prising off the plastic ...”

“... of the original trials – ‘are often perceived as illogical or unfair’. In May 2010 two South London gangs, Shanks and Guns and the Sydenham Boys, confronted each other in a Sydenham park. After a burst of bravado, the Sydenham Boys retreated. As they were running off, a member of their gang, 16-year-old Nicholas Pearton, arrived in the park on his ...”

“... hotel, they seemed not to be certain why they were there or what lingo these chaps spoke. Under London’s cracked pavements, the ancient iron gas pipes were beginning to rupture. In hospital, I sat with a spinal probe jammed between my vertebrae while the consultant kicked the thirty-year-old control cabinet for breaking down. It certainly felt like ...”

“... Fail returned with a huge majority, Haughey became Minister for Health. Two years later, when Jack Lynch, who led the party after Sean Lemass, retired, Haughey won the party leadership by a narrow margin. Now he had all the power he wanted. One theory, to which Bruce Arnold returns throughout his book and which Brian Lenihan, who was Haughey’s deputy ...”

“... age. A lady named Mrs Caine claimed that he had made improper advances to her. The joke went round London that she was certainly Cain but was he Abel? Nothing came of it, and Disraeli is supposed to have said that, if Palmerston dissolved Parliament on the question, he would sweep the country. Gladstone’s habit of accosting prostitutes in order to convert ...”

“... indeed it is one of the closest likenesses between him, Moll Flanders, Roxana and Colonel Jack that their lives are an almost unceasing exercise in problem-solving. ‘Family hierarchy’ also does not quite hit the nail on the head, for Crusoe’s thoughts tend to run more to political than to family sovereignty. Again, and more important, ‘slow ...”

“... even if it does carry heavy significance. How many Conservatives would have rallied to the Union Jack in 1940 if Nye Bevan, not Churchill, had been prime minister? And was not the deep objection to the Falklands War among many on the left rooted in the fact that acceptance of the war meant accepting, at least temporarily, the leadership of Mrs ...”

“... first had been the sudden and unexpected death of his daughter Susy at 24 in 1896. Twain was in London when the news arrived, ‘standing in our dining room thinking of nothing in particular’. He describes the moment in the Autobiography (which he had taken up again in earnest in 1906). ‘A cablegram was put into my hand. It said: “Susy was peacefully ...”

“... that doubts and tensions should begin to invade the office. Alison Macleod and her husband Jack felt them as keenly as any. As time went on the turmoil increased. It was not possible to work as hard and doggedly as they did at the Daily Worker without fanaticism creeping in; an element of judicious detachment was sometimes lacking. Fear of losing ...”

“... to the success of the undertaking or the product sold. In the last decade, the quick way to jack up share prices was to sack people. To pluck an example from my own experience, when Mr David Montgomery was appointed chief executive of the Daily Mirror in 1992, he was immediately showered with share options. The price of the shares was relatively low at ...”

“... the time, The Franklin Papers, whose plot anticipates The Turner Diaries. Both novels derive from Jack London’s ‘revolutionary’s memoir’, The Iron Heel. National Vanguard Books currently offers in its catalogue an edition of The Iron Heel, impudently described as ‘London’s version of The Turner ...”

“... Party, whose devoted and canny networking saw Melville’s first book, Typee, into print in London shortly before his own death at the age of 30. Gansevoort had been Maria Melville’s favourite; she never quite forgave Herman for surviving (and not flourishing), when Gansevoort had been so clearly destined to restore the family’s fortune and ...”