“... 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 ...”

“... the place, and they were a lot better than we were at drawing attention to themselves. I was in London and working on the TLS so a lot of my vitriol was being siphoned off. There was the problem with money too. The printers were saying they wouldn’t print another issue and I didn’t mind too much because I didn’t have anything to put in the ...”

“... for a reputedly six-figure salary, it is impossible to live on a cabinet salary in Central London. Public-spirited ministers who persevere in public office have to make up for lost time. Thus, 99 days after resigning as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Autumn 1989, Nigel Lawson became a non-executive director of Barclays Bank and an adviser within the ...”

“... must be about to happen. Call me the Innocent Abroad. All the same, you can take the boy out of London but you can’t take London out of the boy. You will find my grasp of the local lingo enthusiastic but shaky. I call gas ‘petrol’, and so on. I don’t intend to go native, I’m not here for good, I’m here upon a ...”

“... own conception. In a wild attempt to stop the cycle of suffering, he stabs his son with the same jack-knife he had used to murder his father. As the tragedy ends, the drumming hoofbeats resume. Purgatory is one of the boldest works of Yeats’s turbulent old age. Its reassertion, in the Old Man’s speeches, of the glories of the Protestant Ascendancy, and ...”

“... and brutal marriage with Nigel, eventually breaks free and makes a new life for herself in London. She reads manuscripts and appears on television and teaches. She never thought she wanted to be a teacher: her father was one; Stephanie had taught too, for a time. What she wanted, she says fiercely, was to live.One day she is teaching Scott ...”

“... Kong’s British governors were all appointed by, and solely responsible to, the government in London, but they were assisted by what had become the most experienced team of colonial administrators in the world, under the surveillance of Asia’s biggest press corps, local and foreign (the latter a consequence of the cheap, reliable communications created ...”

“... evening. On the following day, I interviewed an Egyptian diplomat who had spent several years in London and had close dealings with the al-Fayeds. Did he buy the assassination theory? Did al-Fayed himself buy it? Mohamed, said the diplomat, would accept the French judicial findings; he believes in French justice, and of course he hopes that the car crash ...”

“... this out to the waiting courier, who is a graduate of UCL and shouldn’t have to be biking round London delivering letters this cold wet May afternoon. 5 June. My lunch owes a good deal to the Prince of Wales, whose beetroot soup I have and then his raspberry jam in my Yeo Valley yogurt. Jam and soup are both delicious, and in the middle of the yogurt I ...”

“... were still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group, assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918 you ...”

“... and his back is turned towards his wife of thirty years, as is hers to his. They are Mr and Mrs Jack Spratt in person, he tall and gaunt as a hanging judge and she, such a spreading, round little doughball. He is a miser, while she, she is a glutton, a solitary eater, most innocent of vices and yet the shadow or parodic vice of his, for he would like to eat ...”