“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as one of the lower orders, but it was squalor he was in search of in the spikes of Paris and London, not wholesome proletarian virtue. Why he was so severely afflicted with this nostalgie de la boue remains something of a mystery, like much else in his impenetrable private life. It remains no less of a mystery now that Bowker and Taylor have brought the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The ‘great ship’ was the British Empire; the words are those of the imperial historian Jack Gallagher. Noel Annan believed that the ‘peaceful divestment of the empire’ was ‘the most successful political achievement of Our Age’. The main actors on the British side all came out of it pretty chuffed, too. They must have been encouraged in this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... poetry in 1923 and lived in County Wicklow with Iseult Gonne, travelling frequently to Dublin and London; they had two children. Between 1931 and 1939 he published 11 novels, an autobiography and a book called Racing for Profit and Pleasure in Ireland and Elsewhere. Stories of the demise of his marriage begin quite early. In July 1920 Maud Gonne wrote to ...”

“... defensive system ever devised’. Donald’s father, Joe, has a subscription to the Illustrated London News – his collection of back issues dating to the 1910s are handsomely bound in red leather volumes – and it has photographs and artists’ impressions of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his ...”

“... at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring sexiness, even in London. In the 1980s. When I had her.’ When I had her: how the phrase just rolls off the wrist. Memories of Ava weren’t enough to warm Roth on winter nights, as the string of candidates for the role of Jane Eyre dwindled to one. ‘Twelve years ago,’ Taylor ...”

“... Duwayne Brooks. They were waiting to catch a bus near the Well Hall Roundabout in Eltham, South London. A group of white youths ran across the road without warning. Stephen Lawrence was stabbed twice. Duwayne Brooks heard the remark ‘What? What? Nigger!’ as the youths approached. From here on, there is no consensus; everything is subject to ...”

“... Ceylon alone among the former colonies not only retained but promoted the monarchy: the Union Jack flew alongside the Ceylon flag; a new constitution was drafted by an LSE professor, Ivor Jennings; Colombo debutantes were presented at Buckingham Palace; and, thanks to some genealogical ingenuity, George VI was recognised as the latest monarch in the ...”

“... for the worse, as Virginia Woolf recorded in Orlando: ‘The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of the British Isles on the first day of the 19th century stayed, or rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived beneath its ...”

“... I work in mixed media. Gagosian’s doing my next show.) It has not escaped my notice that even in London at the very centre of the intellectual cosmos – the London Review Bookshop on Bury Place – there’s a rubber-stamp shop right next door. Titillating to admit, but as local surveillance cameras would no doubt ...”