“... left me even more baffled since I had no idea who or what ‘the metropolitan pundits’ or ‘the London old-boy circuit’ he mentioned in the first paragraph were. In my Irish town, I did not know that ‘the English scene’ was ‘savage with gang warfare’. I thought that England, since the war, had reverted to being a peaceful and refined place with ...”

“... in its dying days, the Biden administration followed Israel’s script to the letter. In January Jack Lew, the US ambassador to Israel, insisted that he had worked hard ‘on the humanitarian assistance side, to make a bureaucratic system and a security system work so you don’t cross over into famine or malnutrition … Frankly, I don’t think Israel has ...”

“... living in the city for five years or so when he told me he was queer. He’d lived first in the London Terrace complex in Chelsea, then down at the bottom of the West Village, on Charlton Street, off Sixth Avenue. Over the years, I’d visit him and we’d get high, go out to dinner, goof around. It was always a thrill for me, a season’s highlight. He ...”

“... and sax in jazz clubs all around LA. After a short stint in the Army – Pepper was stationed in London after D-Day – he joined the Stan Kenton Orchestra and travelled around the country as Kenton’s lead alto. You can hear one of his very first recorded solos – brief, free, characteristically ductile – three breaks in after the famous scat-singing ...”

“... Adventures called ‘social amphibians’) a matter of derision. His parents managed a thriving London hostelry and inn, the Swan and Hoop, near Bedlam Hospital in Moorfields. In his 1963 biography Walter Jackson Bate represents the household as affectionate, and Keats in particular as brave, just and kind. In his 2012 biography, Nicholas Roe represents the ...”

“... more taxes. When, after the 1857 uprising, the East India Company was replaced by direct rule from London, real power in Kashmir, and other princely states, devolved to a British Resident, usually a fresh face from Haileybury College, serving an apprenticeship in the backwaters of the Empire.Kashmir suffered badly under its Dogra rulers. The corvée was ...”

“... Dan Jacobson, after all, is a distinguished professor emeritus of English at University College London, who has written many novels, critical works and now a compelling, funny and honest travelogue in search of his roots. Rabbi Heshel would not have been impressed, however. He had a terrible row with his wife when he discovered that, during his absence in ...”

“... had been boiled alive to produce it. Craig Murray records his astonishment on being recalled to London to be told that the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, had decided that in the ‘War on Terror’ we should, as a matter of policy, use intelligence obtained through torture by ...”

“... arithmetic. Racism did not need genealogy. The marriage of the world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson – unquestionably Black – to two white women in succession prompted a Georgia congressman in 1912 to argue for a constitutional amendment banning such marriages. There were race riots all over the country when Johnson defeated James J. Jeffries ...”

“... theorist Laura Mulvey, I found myself in the company of another critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin Film Festival. Over dinner he took pleasure in regaling us with stories of the male to female transsexual prostitutes he had met on the city’s streets, and how difficult it was to ‘complete’ the transaction since the transsexual body ...”

“... I remember how comedians only appeared in Film and Radio Fun long after their vogue had passed. Jack Warner with his catchphrase ‘Mind my bike’ and Joe E. Brown were known to me only as personalities from the comics not from the medium which had originally made them famous. I suppose this might be taken as an extension of the Hegelian doctrine that the ...”

“... Novel in Late Capitalist Globalisation – which track the translation of cultural capital from London to Dublin and New York, and the emergence of a globalised fiction in which America is a base.‘Flann O’Brien was right,’ Deane says at the start of ‘Emergency Aesthetics’. ‘Joyce was invented by Americans. He was part of their foreign policy, of ...”

“... with a hoax, it ends even less encouragingly. The last entry, in terms of date of death, is Sir Jack Jacob (1908-2000, ‘barrister and jurist’), who died on 26 December 2000, but the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th ...”

“... around here, outposts of partiality. Coagh, with its red, white and blue kerbstones, has a Union Jack with ‘No Surrender’ emblazoned on it on the side of the public toilets, but a mile or two further on Irish tricolours fly from telephone poles with Sinn Féin election posters nailed to them. Mickey has a builder’s rough hands and a young face. He is ...”

“... from all over southern England crammed together shoulder to shoulder without face masks in Central London, in defiance of the rules against large gatherings, would seem a display of selfishness provocative enough to justify its being broken up by the police. But what is democracy without political protest? And it was a genuine political protest. It was an ...”