“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... factory. As a schoolboy, he wrote essays inspired by hippie texts such as the Tao of Lao Tzu and Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. At the age of 19 he spent three months in prison for refusing national service. ‘He rejects any defence of … the products of civilisation, industrial goods, imported items and financial resources that create today’s ...”

“... features him singing not only ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘Cocaine Blues’, but also the Jack Clement number ‘Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart’, which has the chorus, ‘I’ve been washed down the sink of your conscience/In the theatre of your love I lost my part/And now you say you’ve got me out of your conscience/I’ve been flushed ...”

“... be a herd of revisionist historians and propagandists, all assuring us that if he had lived, ‘Jack’ would never have allowed the CIA and the Joint Chiefs to do anything so barbarous and stupid. Why, just the night before he fell to an assassin, he was ‘wryly’ reconsidering …I am not merely speculating here. During the last freshet of Kennedy-era ...”

“... for those who imagined that human society is, or could one day, be governed by reason,’ Ian Jack wrote in the ‘Unbelievable!’ issue of Granta dedicated in part to Diana’s death. For Elizabeth Wilson, in ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Diana’ in New Left Review, Diana’s mythic status put paid to any feminist component of her story (as if the two ...”