“... Lost World (1912), the explorer John Roxton is recognisably based on Fawcett, whose lectures in London Doyle had attended. He had ‘something of Don Quixote’, Doyle wrote, ‘and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman’, and though his eyes twinkled there lurked in them a ‘capacity for furious wrath and implacable ...”

“... those whose power is itself illegitimate, and who consider themselves above the law. Andrew Jack points out that Vladimir Putin belongs to a special, transitional generation. He was ‘born too late to share any of the Bolsheviks’ original ideals or struggles, but too soon to be fully inculcated with the culture of corruption and chaos which took hold ...”

“... was awaiting the last, and I fancy it was also the first, train of the day to leave Exeter for London. The set was furnished with an entire county’s Sunday newspapers. Local lawyers were carousing in the ladies’ room. A mother and child who had come from London to visit an elder son in a country borstal had been ...”

“... had a wider political effect. But the villains of the piece were capitalism and greed rather than London and English perfidy. Only when what Devine calls ‘Highlandism’ became a significant marker of Scottish identity did all Scots, from wherever they came, begin to think of the clearances as part of their common heritage. It was then that some ...”

“... that was more complicated than the simple diktats Goebbels’s ministry handed down to the RRG. In London, the Ministry of Information delegated responsibility for censorship to the BBC, where the controller of programmes became chief censor and setter of overall guidelines, while a team of ‘switch censors’ monitored every programme, ready to shut down ...”

“... among working-class and lower-middle-class voters … however queasy it made the bien-pensants in London.’ Arguments about over-regulation and sovereignty were of course important, but Farage was adamant, Banks says, that ‘deepening public concern about mass immigration was the key to Brexit.’ Realising that their Tory rivals in Vote Leave would try to ...”

“... and proof-sheets of his magazine; the doctor beaten up by the Secret Police; parties in wartime London; winter journeys in blacked-out trains and lovers beneath the August trees in St James’s Park. They are done with style, written with the elegiac flow appropriate to historical pageantry, and with plenty of detail about clothes, food and rooms ...”

“... to that wreck – and these men saved me – and with true sacrificing zeal, espousal. I know that London is full of cads, flunkeys, fools, evil-doers – all that – but here, too, were several hundred as generous, devoted souls as men could know. I have no mind to forget them – even though Gilder and some of the fellows here declare there’s nothing to ...”

“... Graham Hough’s book were the Lord Northcliffe Lectures in Literature given at University College London in February 1983. The audience was general and the lectures were pitched accordingly. Yet all Yeatsian specialists will profit from this book and the ‘radical simplification’ of Yeats’s occult philosophy which it so lucidly achieves. Professor Hough ...”

“... Three and a half hours into the auction at the Westbury Hotel in London earlier this year, Jason Chapman is smoking Old Holborn rolled in liquorice paper. In the inside left pocket of his blazer is the ‘Lake Taupo’. He has been assigned to guard it with his life. The stamp has a caramel brown frame, with ‘New Zealand’ at the top, ‘Postage Revenue’ and ‘4d Four Pence 4d’ at the bottom ...”

“... the media-bombarded visual world Perry’s exhibition looks back beyond. Many of the paintings – Jack Smith’s black-grey-brown After the Meal, Ruskin Spear’s dusky Hammersmith Broadway, Victor Pasmore’s misty Riverside Gardens, Paul Nash’s bleak East Anglian sea wall in Promenade – are sadder and more solemn than the photographs. Sickert’s brown ...”

“... though the inevitable end has turned out to be a dead one, and a phenomenally false start. In The London Hanged Linebaugh himself gets off to an unpromising start. He maintains that ‘the intensification of capital punishment has become a worldwide trend since the mid-Seventies,’ citing particularly its use by five countries: South ...”

“... the kind of Eton-and-Oxford Englishman who had made him feel so alien and unappreciated in the London literary world when he first tried to set up as a writer after the war. The truth, as it turns out, is that by the 1950s Green was in his way as much of an outsider as Dahl. His literary friends and fans, too, were un-English – the Americans Eudora Welty ...”

“... A spokesman admits that the cancellation of the Saturday night sleeper from London to Aberdeen ‘until the end of time’ is a bitter blow for those who like to wake up on a Sunday morning to the munching of Highland cattle, but there can be no question of having the train back, say the men at Euston. They can’t find a single soul who’ll agree to work the shift ...”

“... write anywhere, so the family moved around. In 1898, when Van Dyke was 15 months old, they came to London, and then toured France, Italy and Germany before returning to England in 1902. The next year the family went back to San Francisco, where they built a Mediterranean villa in Mill Valley, on the side of Mount Tamalpais overlooking the bay. They called it ...”