“... in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if we’ve made progress on any of them.’ It is not hard to guess what this hard-boiled gathering – Bob Mellish, Denis Healey, Tony Crosland, Barbara Castle, Roy ...”

“... State for Northern Ireland, Mr William Whitelaw, to invite the leaders of the IRA to meet him in London: a serious mistake by a British political leader who otherwise distinguished himself in this most exacting portfolio, and came nearer to solving the Irish problem at Sunningdale in December, 1973, than anyone before or since. The process of building up the ...”

“... and visit interesting churches and gardens or have dinner in Cambridge with the historian Jack Plumb. Her bad temper was due in part to intellectual frustration. She was an intelligent woman and her mother’s refusal to provide her with any formal education was one source of resentment in their generally fractious relationship. Another pleasure of ...”

“... as an assistant lecturer in moral philosophy at Edinburgh. After two years, he moved to the London School of Economics, where he was to stay for the next 35 years. A photograph of the 26-year-old Gellner, three years into his LSE lectureship, shows a strong, athletic, sexy-looking man, hardened by his passion for mountaineering and skiing as well as by ...”

“... thinking on North-South relations. This was pioneered by Lemass, adhered to by the underestimated Jack Lynch, and pursued most eloquently by Garret Fitzgerald. Charles Haughey, who had tried to arm the Provisional IRA in 1969, later claimed that he played a key part in what would be called ‘the peace process’, but this now seems as threadbare as his ...”

“... was black. Gates submitted it for examination to, among others, the expert who had exposed the ‘Jack the Ripper Diaries’ as a fraud. The issue of authentication was vital, and went beyond the nature of the artefact itself. Granted that the paper, ink and other external markers dated it to somewhere between 1855 and 1860, and given that the ...”

“... of Hong Kong flares up and amicably subsides. Entirely by chance, we meet the Pattens in London the very next evening for the first time since long before they went to Hong Kong. Impossible to resist mentioning the Keswick/Needham confrontation, by which Patten is totally unsurprised. Much curiosity about what he sees himself doing next, but no clues ...”

“... of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack Fairweather writes in his powerful history of the war. The instruction was, it seems, hardly needed. The fall of Musa Qala in 2013, ‘once the focus of the British military’s anxiety about their standing in the world, barely registered in the national ...”

“... the third person): Rather glad he came back – speech apparently immense success. Elsa Maxwell in London. Very bored with everything except his Cim. Cimmie: I am so glad we are like we are and not just ordinary hus and wife. Tom: Last night very amusing dinner party of about 20. Viola Tree funnier than you would believe. A new stunt – ‘learning to ...”

“... Higher Education and Literary Supplements; we know about HarperCollins, and hence about Jack Higgins, and about Fourth Estate, and hence about The Corrections; we know about the BSkyB network in Britain, about its role in pioneering multi-channel TV, and about its ownership of the rights to transmit Premier League football, which have just been ...”

“... thought police to do away with sex and sexuality, as an account of the lives of gay men in London in 1948, the year the novel was written. Woods quotes passages like this: ‘He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the ...”

“... of France and England in the summer of 1933, where the band’s triumphant two-week run at the London Palladium broke all box-office records and inspired ever higher praise. ‘I received the thrill of a lifetime to hear what is unquestionably the world’s greatest brass section,’ Constant Lambert wrote in the Sunday Referee. ‘His music has a truly ...”

“... and on Instagram and Facebook, too. ‘I love England,’ she wrote in one post, next to a Union Jack, and ‘Live in London’, beside an emoji of a small house and a very green tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to ...”

“... partly because he appears to find England preferable to Scotland. In 1971, having fled Fife for London’s alternative media scene, Lloyd wrote in the countercultural Ink magazine that ‘the Scot, to be free, has to know himself as a man. Knowing himself only as a Scot enslaves him.’ It was ‘tempting’, he added, to view ‘Scots abroad as ambitious ...”

“... told the reporter that he had tried and failed to catch this talking animal, whom he called ‘Jack’ (‘Gef’ came later). He insisted to the reporter that nothing that had happened in his home was ‘supernatural’ – there were ‘no spooks here’. Irving knew that ‘the Dalby Spook’ was the name given to Gef in the wider community of the Isle ...”