“... having spent a glum couple of days grieving over Rupert’s bag with his computer, left on the London train last week and deemed irretrievably lost until he had a phone call from Newcastle telling him to go to Doncaster where he would find it. And so he does, computer, keys and cards all intact and handed over by a smiling porter ...”

“... quotes a passage of self-accusation, written years later, from his journals: ‘If she had come to London and lived with me in the Fifties, she could have been sustained by human contact ... I could have postponed her death at the expense of my own absorption in self-advancement. I chose not to.’ The point is not that he neglected his parents. We are all ...”

“... about her relationship with Joshua Reynolds, and Marat later claimed to have seduced her in London. There was no substance to most of it, but Kauffman knew the risks she ran. When lovely woman stooped to folly, the consequences usually depended on how far up the social scale she had started. Elizabeth Foster eventually became the Duchess of ...”

“... and like many young women of her class in Ireland, she was already well used to life in London when in 1898 she enrolled at the Slade to study painting. For the first half of her long life, Gray knew everybody. At the Slade she met Wyndham Lewis, and soon made friends with the potter Bernard Leach, the explorer Henry Savage Landor and the sculptor ...”

“... At the end of his stay in Paris, Wedekind remembered ‘Alice, Rachel, Germaine, Marie Louise, Raymonde, Madeleine, Lucienne and my little Christ child’, and commended them to the care of Gaston Fero, who was seeing him off on the train to London. He forgot to mention ‘the little blonde piglet’ (perhaps the ...”

“... One of their assailants was said to have looked like Rosenblum. A few days later he was in London, with plenty of money to splash around. He took rooms in Lambeth, refreshed his wardrobe and found work as an art dealer with Wilfrid Voynich, a one-time Polish-Lithuanian revolutionary who had escaped from Siberia in 1890. Voynich would later open an ...”

“... survivors fled abroad. The largest group, about 3500 refugees and their families, headed for London, where so many European revolutionaries of that century (French, Russian, Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian) had been allowed to settle. Fitzrovia, the web of streets around Fitzroy Square, had always attracted French exiles, and it was in Newman Passage ...”

“... and friends keep moving around. Travel is permitted on designated routes, though passing through London or what’s left of it (‘Unfortunate destruction’, a visiting official admits, ‘yet necessary’) involves prolonged interrogation. Every country walk or visit to the beach carries a risk; each passer-by is potentially an enemy. In the most ...”

“... essay by eight contemporary artists: Elaine de Kooning, Rosalyn Drexler, Marjorie Strider, Louise Nevelson, Lynda Benglis, Eleanor Antin, Rosemarie Castoro and Suzi Gablik. These ran the gamut from tentative support for Nochlin’s argument to outright rejection of the category ‘woman artist’. Nevelson’s blunt riposte to the categorisation of ...”

“... November 1963, Johnson went to join his mother, who had emigrated to England to work as a nurse. London, he had heard, was a city of great ladies and dukes and horse-drawn carriages; instead he found a grey landscape of bleak buildings and biting winds. More shocking still was the existence of a white English peasantry; the ‘arrivants’ (to borrow Kamau ...”

“... passage with the Préfet and our ambassador Duff Cooper about the latter’s relations with Madame Louise de Vilmorin. The fourth pays tribute to Bertrand Russell, a great Whig lord like himself and like him a monster of intelligence. In the fifth we are with the Agricultural Research Council, only to be told of an unusual and simple cure for eczema practised ...”

“... and uncaring worldly mother. The most vivid character and best lay in the story is not the writer Louise de Vilmorin who questioned the Baron about circumcision while running her fingers through his pubic hair, but Charley Brighton, née Charlotte Bouquet, the daughter of a hotel doorman in Grenoble: ‘I spotted this piece of skirt strolling along the ...”

“... to glorify Napoleon I’s conquests) on 16 May. Women were very active during the Commune. Louise Michel, a schoolteacher, medical worker and anarchist, treated those injured on the barricades and joined the National Guard. Elisabeth Dmitrieff, the daughter of a tsarist official, was a co-founder of the Women’s Union. She was also representative of ...”

“... for a while a close associate of the militant revolutionary Blanqui; in 1880, he met Karl Marx in London, as well as Mill and Herbert Spencer; and in New York he met General Grant, though no one seems to know what they talked about. Clemenceau, who was never either clément nor sot, was not just a Tiger – as the journalists called him – but an ...”

“... propaganda against the Sinhalese. Nothing my wife, who is Sinhalese and works for BBC News in London, said could impinge on this belief. There have been demonstrations outside Bush House and White City by both Sinhalese and Tamil protesters, each insisting that the BBC is biased against them. Given that it is the only news broadcaster which keeps a ...”