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“... flourished for two centuries, finally closing in 1859. Vauxhall’s special status, Alan Borg and David Coke argue in this hefty antiquarian tome, lies in its originality as a commercial venture, the changes it triggered in the social and cultural life of London, the extreme heterogeneity of the mingling crowds, the mass audience the gardens gave to ...”

“... lady’s support. According to Schreckinger, Owens arranged for Jill Biden to pay a visit to a Coke job-training programme in Brazil, joined Joe and John Kerry for the unveiling of the Coke-sponsored 2014 World Cup trophy, and tagged along with Jill as part of a government delegation to Cuba, which happens to be one of ...”

“... of it. By the end he seemed to imagine that ideas alone might sustain the body. He lived on Diet Coke. When I first sat with him, in an hôtel particulier off the boulevard St-Germain that he retained for lunches, Frédéric Gouby, his maître d’hôtel, brought him a carafe of Diet Coke on a silver salver. The food was ...”

“... This becomes: ‘Je m’habille affreusement mal mais bois tout le temps, j’ai arrêté la coke mais j’aime les filles’ (‘I dress horribly badly but drink all the time, I’ve given up coke but I love girls’). At the end of the English paragraph the surprise is that Marina Petrova turns out to be bald. In ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”

“... think any better of the Petition of Right, the reprise of Magna Carta designed by Sir Edward Coke to recall Charles I to his constitutional duty: according to Coke’s grandson Roger, he called it ‘the Petition of Shite’. I can find scant mention of this menacing language and conduct in those biographies of ...”

“... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...”

“... he has closeted away, refused to inspect. At a party in his apartment one guest is sniffing coke, another is drunk, and another packs a gun and shoots a rival. The world he lives off and yet keeps at bay has invaded his home. Lucas goes berserk, and smashes the offender’s head inside the grand piano. In fact, almost none of the men in his ...”

“... and messiness cleaned up. Compare, for example, Dyer’s anti-travel writing with that of the late David Foster Wallace, another sort-of post-mod sort-of slacker, with many similar interests and of much the same generation. Dyer could not, as Wallace did in ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ (1996), study the horror of embodiment while ...”

“... settled into its give and take, you find it’s impossible to live anywhere else. It’s the coke-and-caffeine jungle of being seventeen and readier to kill than be killed and to know that Job One is to secure your objective and after that it’s unsupervised play till the next order comes down.’ The raw misery of his unsupervised play continues far ...”

“... remembers certain things, especially about her children, and her ‘heart sinks’.Born Lady Anne Coke, she was the first child and eldest daughter of the future fifth earl of Leicester, later an equerry to George VI, and his wife, Elizabeth Yorke, daughter of the eighth earl of Hardwicke. The first chapter of Lady in Waiting, covering her ‘idyllic’ early ...”

“... Good now extends this fine line of wit even further: Here is a list of the people that Andrew and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William ...”

“... on a steady supply of underwood and it was very much in their interest to conserve this. Coal and coke took over from charcoal, not because wood had grown hard to come by, but because of their lower labour costs. The mesmeric effect of the written word has similarly led historians to exaggerate greatly the importance of oak-woods as pannage for pigs. Acorn ...”

“... his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest ...”

“... a young man invites himself in, exchanges some small talk, then asks Humiston if he can do some coke. When Humiston agrees, the visitor shoots up with a mixture of cocaine and heroin, and slides into a narcotic stupor at the end of the bed. The out of his depth out-of-towner is hardly an original theme, but it’s a rich one, and Humiston’s tale – the ...”