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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... York to be a ‘giant snake pit’, Los Angeles to be ‘quel hole’. Naples was ‘crooked’, London ‘a dreary place’. Even Paris, ‘a divine city’, could be ‘colder than a nun’s cunt’. Once he had passed the quarter century he hit on Rome: ‘a beautiful city, really – though inhabited by a quarrelsome and cynical race’. From Taormina in ...”

“... In the first volume of the series, Master and Commander, he meets up with a young Naval officer, Jack Aubrey, when the two discover a mutual passion for Boccherini, and a pleasure in playing him together on violin and viola. The partnership continues throughout the series, with Jack captaining sloops, frigates and other ...”

“... Louvre. Paris is generous to people finding their way round with maps. Here (as is not the case in London) street names are abundant. You can find them at almost any junction. Later, looking on the internet for something about the form the signs take, I came upon an electronic magazine, Ruavista: Signs of the City, in which the street as museum is celebrated ...”