“... 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 ...”

“... parents. But her mind is elsewhere: after 35 years of happy, childless marriage, her husband, Jack, a professor of ancient history, has told her that he wants to have an affair with a younger woman. He still loves her and doesn’t want to break up the relationship but, he says: ‘I need it. I’m 59. This is my last shot. I’ve yet to hear evidence for ...”

“... Previn was plain ‘Mr Preview’ – the name by which, he told McCann, he is still known to many London cab-drivers more than twenty-five years after appearing on the show. This is the levelling down on which the British like to pride themselves, that sometimes aggressive way in which egalitarianism is asserted by the business of taking down a peg or ...”

“... most substantial writing in his latter years was devoted to the work of another artist friend, Jack Yeats, particularly to those paintings where the painter, like his brother, conjured up an Ireland both ‘terrible and gay’. For painter, poet and ex-revolutionary, such visions supplied a kind of compensation. English has had unique access to ...”

“... Readers of the London Review of Books who like football probably like football so much that, having begun the present article, they will be obliged to finish it. This suits me down to the ground. Intellectual football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by intellectuals and football-lovers alike, who regard our addiction as affected, pseudo-proletarian, even faintly homosexual ...”

“... by the children – who pull faces, mocking and baiting them. Together looks unflinchingly at London’s postwar harshness and poverty, and brings a sensibility about exclusion formed by Mazzetti’s own story.* In 1944, when she was living in a farmhouse outside Florence with her extended family, Wehrmacht soldiers knocked on the door and killed her ...”

“... along by commercial good sense. In the 1730s, the tree nursery established by Sir John Evelyn Bt (Jack, the diarist’s grandson) supplied trees for some of the most elegant landscapes designed in early Georgian England. In Evelyn’s own day, young trees were more usually shipped from Holland. I come from what D.J. Taylor has called the ...”

“... for Jack Brown I Sitting Bull On Christmas Morning Who put this pit-head wheel, Smashed but carefully folded In some sooty fields, into his stocking? And this lifetime nightshift – a snarl Of sprung celluloid? Here’s his tin flattened, His helmet. And the actual sun closed Into what looks like a bible of coal That falls to bits as he lifts it ...”

“... Jack Straw was one of the longest serving ministers in the history of the Labour Party. He spent 13 years in office, as home secretary, foreign secretary, leader of the House of Commons and justice minister. His book’s title, Last Man Standing, derives from the curious rule by which the lord chancellor (which Straw became in 2007, at the same time as being secretary of state for justice) is the last member of an outgoing government to resign ...”

“... In George Peele’s Elizabethan play The Old Wives’ Tale, a character called Jack interrogates the ‘wandering knight’ Eumenides: ‘Are you not the man, sir (deny it if you can, sir) that came from a strange place in the land of Catita, where Jackanapes flies with his tail in his mouth, to seek out a lady as white as snow and as red as blood?’ Jack is dead ...”

“... of the Belle Époque were taken: of the galleonic Anna la Pradvina being towed along by a pair of Jack Russells; of women in towering rococo hats and complicated veils; of a threesome (two in black-and-white striped dresses) standing on chairs at a racecourse – an image which half a century later inspired Cecil Beaton in his designs for My Fair ...”

“... On 3 April 1986, at his filling-station in north Dallas, Billy Jack Mason was protesting about the fall in the price of oil. Cars came from as far as Waco, and by breakfast, the queue was six miles long. He was offering unleaded at zero cents a gallon. Reporters sought Billy’s opinion on the future. ‘That’s overseas ...”

“... Smith the writer it was comfortable, though not always convenient, to live out of the centre of London: for Stevie the celebrity it was a triumph – an acquaintance is cited here as drawling that her ‘ability’ to live in Palmers Green while moving in London literary circles was ‘the most compelling thing about ...”

“... Porter (‘one of homeopathy’s most pre-eminent specialists’), travelled to Berlin, Paris and London as a special correspondent for the American Homeopathic Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. There’s another red flag: never trust a 19th-century male medic who is excessively interested in obs and gynae.‘This is the story of a murder, not a ...”

“... or may not have been Albert Carstairs, a Scottish army officer who disappeared before her birth in London. Her volatile, oil heiress mother – subsequently a heroin addict and dabbler in bizarre rejuvenation therapies – seems not to have paid much attention to the odd little homunculus to whom she had given birth. (‘I was never a little girl,’ Carstairs ...”