“... Wiertz is hardly an old master, about suffering he wasn’t wrong either. 25 June. As I leave Robin Hope’s birthday party at the Old Sessions House in Clerkenwell Square someone says that England scored in the first minute against Portugal. The pubs I pass seem oddly subdued, with none of the usual crowds spilling out onto the pavement or the roars from ...”

“... hospital admissions in the US in 1873, 29 million a year in the Sixties. ‘Who killed cock robin?’ one of his sources asks: who killed the primary-care doctor whose job it was to provide individual solace? Again, the division of labour that characterises industrial-style medicine has its virtues. Specialisation pays. The greatest ‘cutter for ...”

“... into trouble. Last year, Jo Shuter, the former head of Quintin Kynaston Academy in St John’s Wood, was banned from teaching after admitting to widespread misuse of public funds – using school money for taxis, phones and a great many flowers, plus £7000 for her 50th birthday party and £8269 for a boutique-hotel jolly for senior staff. The school was ...”

“... of Sixth Avenue, in the vicinity of Washington Square, at a more sedate watering-hole, with more wood than chrome, a juke box inclining more towards jazz and smokey-voiced balladeers than towards disco, where I might come across the occasional young lady. Not long after my brother unburdened himself to me I wound up living with him for extended ...”

“... Anwar’s. She had passed the shop many times as it was midway between the flats and St John’s Wood High Street; indeed she remembered it opening and the little draper’s and babies’ knitwear shop which it had replaced and where she had been a loyal customer. That had been kept by a Miss Dorsey, from whom over the years she had bought the occasional ...”

“... solved the flooding problem and other inventor-adventurers worked out how to use coal instead of wood to smelt iron. It was another hundred years again before it was all put together – the coal, the iron, the wagonway and the engine – and the railways proper came into being. (Wrought iron rails were developed at Bedlington Ironworks, just west of ...”