“... demonstrations. As for his parents, ‘I would disappoint their hopes of a profession and be a black sheep. I carefully oiled and greased my rifle, wrapped it in oily rags, and made my brothers promise to take care of it. Then I left home in March of 1918.’ At 20, he joined the brotherhood of freedom-fighters, who now became his closest family. ...”

“... Milton Keynes is a direct descendant of Bloomsbury seems about as plausible as trying to show that Michael Foot speaks with the authentic voice of the Levellers. More fundamentally, the central argument of this book, that London’s homely architecture is the product and expression of Londoners’ homely virtues, is chronologically unsound. Most of the ...”

“... to resist Turkey’s invasion of one-third of Cyprus in 1974. No Task Force defended the black majority in Rhodesia, when Ian Smith illegally seized power in 1965. Britain did not identify with the East Timorese or the people of West Sahara when they were taken over by the Indonesians and Moroccans in 1975 – even though 50,000 Timorese died in a ...”

“... With no more murmurs in the Liberal ranks In Labour’s there is total consternation. If Michael Foot tore out his hair in hanks He could not look more prone to perturbation. The right wing loudly calls the left wing cranks And no one stays calm in the altercation Except for Tony Benn, who sucks contentedly On his prop pipe and stares ahead ...”

“... sashayed over to his wardrobe, and navigated my way across the sea of footwear to his black Pierre Cardin alligator-skin shoes I’d secretly always had my eye on.’) Like so many Soho lives, Bernie’s ended badly, by his own hand, but he was a prize. He would sort anybody out with a drink or out of a spot, and it’s impossible to remember his ...”

“... as I tried to navigate the right Morlock tunnel, the least unreliable lift, was that the black hole at the epicentre of this vortex of urban restlessness was a necropolis to the age of cinema. The votive spectre, sentimentalised, inflated, patched into every available blank space, was Charles Spencer Chaplin: ‘London’s world famous star’. Child ...”

“... Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists had few friends in the newspapers. A bizarre exception was Michael Wharton, a satirical and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions ...”

“... lesson in the fragility of popularity and public esteem. Pacelli was a favoured son of Rome’s ‘black nobility’, the cluster of families whose 19th-century fortunes were built on service to the papacy. In these circles, the Pacellis ranked very high, described by one historian as the most important papal family since the Borgias. Eugenio’s ...”

“... The 1930s, the chronicler of American poverty Michael Harrington once said, ended in 1948, when the Cold War began to call into question the idea that democracy would lead to socialism. But by that definition, perhaps the 1930s didn’t really end until 11 September 1973, when Pinochet launched his coup against Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, and Allende committed suicide in the national palace ...”

“... Beirut, escaping the sun to browse the books on politics in the Virgin Megastore. A stack of Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country is in front of me. Across the street is the tent city that protesters against the Syrian presence in Lebanon pitched soon after the Valentine’s Day assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister. A few ...”

“... on any subject. (Except, that is, to the States, presumably to curb any Atlanticist tendencies.) Black Mercedes stand in lines outside to whisk them to and from their hotels. And then there are the travel and subsistence allowances. To the predictable outrage of the British tabloids, MEPs recently voted not to implement a system whereby these allowances ...”

“... must seem gnomic to any but the unnaturally well-informed. To write that ‘like Murdoch in The Black Prince, Golding also moved into metafictional mode in The Paper Men (1984)’ with that purposive, energetic-sounding verb ‘moved into’, is meaningless unless it is explained that William Golding’s The Paper Men was a late, and lame, novel of ...”

“... of the museum), and the other half from just four people: the hedge fund billionaires Leon Black, Kenneth Griffin and Steven Cohen, and the media mogul David Geffen (a new centre is named after Cohen and his wife, and an entire wing after Geffen). They responded to the call of MoMA’s director, Glenn Lowry, to recapture the idea proposed by Alfred ...”

“... Shaun Murphy, a solid player who was the world champion in 2005, named the retired footballer Michael Owen. Judd Trump, currently ranked second in the world, named the still-playing footballer Mason Mount. Mark Selby, who has been world champion four times and UK champion twice, said Nicko McBrain, the drummer from Iron Maiden. When the journalist asked ...”

“... of bitterness. When the war ended, Jones was left without a commission. A spell fighting in the Black Sea against the Turks as a rear admiral in Catherine the Great’s navy ended abruptly when he was accused of raping a ten-year-old girl and in 1790 he returned to France in disgrace.He died in Paris in July 1792 at the age of 45 and was buried in the Saint ...”