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“... time which reduces every labour myth to dust, Maxwell Joseph acquired the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The brewery – with its stables, cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment of the City. A benevolent and paternalistic ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... a value on titles,’ he purred, ‘and I go with the great stream of life.’ Another member was David Garrick, who grew up alongside Johnson in provincial Lichfield, and shot to prominence in his twenties for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the ...”

“... to a version of style that negates itself and calls itself Austerity. (The opening chapter of David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, 1945-51 is called ‘Waiting for Something to Happen’.) It can take a while for a decade to have a style. The 1950s, for example, weren’t really the 1950s until the 1960s so clearly turned out to be the 1960s.* We know ...”

“... fiction the actors offered only a false address in the United States and posh premises in Park Lane equipped with an answering machine. Grylls was hooked at once. He recommended the legendary lobbyist Ian Greer, who was approached by the hoaxers and, like Grylls, immediately hoodwinked. Lured to the bogus Park ...”

“... and crabbed at the nearby dock in Waldport. My friend Charlie Vermont, a poet, introduced me to David Shetzline and his wife, M.F. Beal, both writers, who lived up the road from us in a place called Beavercreek. We got into some swinging scenes, did some major acid, talked about the world. Shetzline had been a student with Thomas Pynchon at Cornell in the ...”

“... wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write ...”

“... those who support Save Britain’s Heritage know only too well. We live in a retrospective age and David Lowenthal’s discursive study is a product of it. One of the attractions of this book is that it enables the Melton Constables of the world to be seen in the context of the future as well as the past. David Lowenthal is ...”

“... Western Europe reaches one of its fine points here, like Cape Wrath in Sutherland, Lleyn and St David’s Head in Wales, and Cornuaille in Brittany. In such places we come across peaks and juts of rock which look and feel like those in West Penwith: ‘look’ because they draw our eyes and feet like magnets, ‘feel’ because the whitish crystals of ...”

“... David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath (Regency dress parade, bonnet-making workshops, ‘Tea with Mr Darcy’), submitted opening chapters and plot synopses of Austen’s novels to 18 British publishers and agents, changing just the titles and characters’ names. Lassman was ‘staggered’, he told the Guardian, when he received form letter rejections back ...”

“... happily hold forth for hours about the rugged terrace-time I’d served, at Feethams, White Hart Lane, the Manor Ground. And when it came to the archival stuff, if you could spare the time, well, so could I. ‘Name three of the Spurs’ double side’s reserves,’ I’d say, or: ‘How many of the 1964 West Ham cupwinning team had names beginning with a ...”

“... to me was worried that he wouldn’t be able to get an interview with any of the guys from GQ. David Gandy, the male supermodel, wearing a shark-tooth suit and a Burberry tie, was being interviewed for Fashion TV. Within seconds of him standing up people were photographing him being filmed. You see this all the time at fashion events. Legend says there was ...”

“... one point in the footage three officers, Derek Michael Chauvin, Alexander Kueng and Thomas Kieran Lane, can be seen kneeling on Floyd, applying pressure to his neck, torso and legs. A combined weight of around 600 lbs pressed George Floyd into the ground while he pleaded: ‘I can’t breathe, man, please.’The most widely shared recording, made by ...”

“... Ian Parker describes in Autopia how a signal engineer got vehicles flowing again at the Hanger Lane gyratory system in London by finding seven ‘spare’ seconds in a nearby set of traffic lights. When this time was redistributed between other lights, the traffic in the system – around eight thousand vehicles an hour – flowed better, but only for a ...”

“... buying Penguin Books’ American branch. The two men crossed the pond for talks with Alan [sic] Lane. Epstein was not impressed. He decided that Lane, ‘like most British publishers’, was in hock to his bankers. The penguin would never fly. Epstein went home to the skyscrapers, where a publisher could spread his ...”