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“... 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 ...”

“... minister Bill Rammell had been briefed by the Red Cross about them in March; on his return to London, as the then foreign secretary Jack Straw admitted in a statement to the Commons that June, Rammell had briefed senior figures in the FCO. Then there was the government’s admission that it had made Diego Garcia ...”

“... of Germany’s war effort had been repurposed to create a vast Apollonian glade.When I moved to London in the summer of 1978, it wasn’t just the bright constellation of Krautrock that was in the air, but a whole extraordinary flowering of German creativity: films, books, music, art. I remember my first sight of a huge canvas by Anselm Kiefer, hung high up ...”

“... morning to be sitting at my desk, watching the rag-and-bone man push his cart past the window, his Jack Russell stood eagerly in the prow as if waiting to strike land.On Any Questions on Radio 4 tonight are Roy Hattersley and Edward Heath, Janet Cohen and Jonathon Porritt. Neither Heath nor Hattersley is a particular favourite of mine but because no one on the ...”

“... to end.But the distinctiveness of Edinburgh was to Stevenson a moveable and a copious feast. The London of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde feels so like Edinburgh because his home city was deeply ingrained in him and he carried it with him like a way of thinking. He entered it whenever he wrote a sentence, the rise and fall of his prose a secret ...”

“... long after its owner had left. It was handed over to me nine years ago in the car park of a London church on a miserable, gun-metal grey morning. The suitcase is chalk-coloured, weather-speckled, hooped with warped wooden struts. It smells of damp and the stale vapours of the past. It is fastened by two rusty lockable latches, but there are no keys, so ...”