“... snag up. Outsiders, transients, put it down to road works; an extension of the tarmac hole that is London. But three helicopters to the south, somewhere over Vallance Road or Cheshire Street, that is unusual. One chopper, ferrying traumatised meat to the Royal London Hospital, we’re used to that. Three choppers, catching ...”

“... you can buy three cemeteries and a pint of beer and still have change from a pound? Answer: the London Borough of Westminster. Boom boom. This makes the price of a pint of beer in 1986 slightly less than 85p. The cemeteries, in Hanwell, East Finchley and Mill Hill, whose upkeep was the responsibility of the Highways and Works Committee of Westminster City ...”

“... the condemned man or woman ‘danced the Paddington frisk’. ‘The whole vagabond population of London,’ the diarist Francis Place wrote, ‘all the thieves, and all the prostitutes, all those who were evil-minded, and some, a comparatively few, curious people made up the mob on those brutalising occasions.’ The memorial to the execution site at Marble ...”

“... In January​ 1961 I came to London and started looking for a job. I’d graduated the previous June and been told by the person in charge of women’s appointments that the best I could hope for was a job as a typist. In March I started work at Faber, as the advertising manager’s secretary. Faber was T.S. Eliot’s firm: my father was very impressed ...”

“... element concerns Scruton’s treatment of his father, to whom he returns or alludes several times. Jack Scruton was born into the lower ranks of the Northern industrial working class: one of eight children, two of whom died in infancy, he grew up in the back streets of Ancoats, child of a Lawrentian marriage between a physical, drunken father and a mother with ...”

“... house of Sir William and Lady Wilde, as his son would later dine at the house of Oscar Wilde in London. The lawyer and politician Isaac Butt had been a college classmate of his father’s and remained a close friend, close enough for John Butler Yeats’s father to call his youngest son Isaac Butt Yeats. Among Yeats’s best friends at school were two ...”

“... with, the world of his grandparents, whose ancien régime may be represented by the Illustrated London News. He takes one of the great lines of English poetry and impatiently speeds it up, pragmatically recasting it in terms of his own inheritance: ‘They’re all gone into a world of light; the farm’s my own.’ For all the élite Bostonian whiff that ...”

“... The pop star Justin Bieber was born in London, Ontario, the son of two teenagers. His mother was a high-school dropout who liked beer and LSD, and his father an amateur musician. Jeremy Jack Bieber, also a heavy drinker, was in the local jail the night his son was born. He abandoned the family when Bieber was ten months old and went on to pursue a career as a martial arts fighter, often missing visits to his son, resurfacing now and then with a guitar in tow as the boy got older ...”

“... being put to death, insisted that the state keep its word.* In March of the following year, in the London Review of Books, the book was examined at length by Christopher Ricks, whose piece was reprinted – at Mailer’s suggestion, or so I was told at the time – in the form of an advertisement in the New York Review of Books. The piece was laudatory ...”

“... For months​ after I was summoned to appear for jury duty in North London, I couldn’t stop asking people – in England, in America – if they’d ever been called up too. The question worked less well here, where 65 per cent of people will never be jurors, but nearly all the Americans I talked to seemed to have done it – or to have got out of it by saying ‘I don’t trust the police,’ or being opposed to the death penalty, or having been the victim of a violent crime, or being a lawyer ...”

“... until the American editor came up with the improved title, Wolfman). This sent Rebus south to London, on secondment to a murder enquiry in which the killer takes a bite out of his unfortunate victims. Rankin spent time in London and hated it, so he makes Rebus hate it too, and in the course of doing so comes up with ...”

“... Jean-Pierre Grumbach, a former soldier in the 71st artillery regiment in Fontainebleau, arrived in London. Grumbach, an Alsatian Jew from Paris, 25 years old, wanted to offer his services to the Forces Françaises Combattantes (FFC) – de Gaulle’s Free French. His journey had begun seven months earlier in Marseille, where he had distributed pamphlets for ...”

“... I undertook a series of what I called – with a nod to Iain Sinclair’s circumambulation of London – ‘radial walks’. These were tramps of between three and five days from my home near the city’s centre out into its hinterland, following either a cardinal or an ordinal point of the compass, depending on which direction most appealed to me at the ...”

“... motion and create the conditions for a terror alert. It’s how things have been since the days of Jack Bauer and 24: you catch your man, he talks, you act. There is never time for anything else. A detailed case study of how wrong it can all go is provided by Ricin!: The Inside Story of the Terror Plot That Never Was (Pluto, £14.99). You remember the ...”

“... rancorous book, remarkable for its account of the lower-middle-class childhood on the fringes of London, and for its vengeful portrait of a mother who had ‘eyes that missed nothing and understood nothing’. Osborne’s father worked in an advertising agency. He was a semi-invalid for most of his son’s youth; his mother was a barmaid – or, as she put ...”