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“... cinemas, where mega-ice-lollies and straggly Yellow Bellies are sold in a state of nature. Henry Mayhew, frequently cited in this book, told how a street vendor of sweets wrapped his wares in pages torn from old books and a heap of Acts of Parliament. The old damerun sweet shop usually supplied sweets in a conical paper poke not unlike the one from which a ...”

“... to regain control of barricaded republican areas. Much to the chagrin of the British commander, Robert Ford, the IRA was thus enabled to fight another day – and a bloodbath was avoided. During the early years of the conflict the main tendency of this contact switched from operational discussions to high-level engagement aimed at a settlement.The first ...”

“... patronising voluntary bodies. Now scholars are less sure. As regards transport and the utilities, Robert Millward points out that councils tended to buy out only enterprises which were in consistent profit, such as gas companies. Councillors’ motives were often not so much to provide an economic or efficient service overall as to relieve the rates ...”

“... he economised on effort, and maximised his income, by quoting copiously: in a piece on Henry Mayhew, one quotation fills almost two pages of this edition. He would, I suspect, have loved the word-count facility of computers. Writing prose could also be seen as one response to the situation he identified in speaking of Tennyson, that of the lyric poet ...”

“... chancellor of the ruling party (and now by the sister-in-law of a former prime minister).Henry​ Mayhew, the mid-Victorian journalist who produced the extraordinary, enormous survey London Labour and the London Poor, wrote best about the city when he could see it from a height. Gazing across London from Hampstead he described a gothic city, skeins of ...”

“... the 1951 film adaptation of Show Boat. When the sheriff arrives to arrest Steve Baker (played by Robert Sterling) for being married to Julie LaVerne (played by Ava Gardner), the leading lady in a riverboat revue who we learn has ‘negro blood’, he pricks her finger, sucks her blood and proclaims that he now has ‘negro blood’ too. In Mississippi, where ...”

“... commonly posed or faked, to its over-simplistic headlines and its unintentional absurdities. Robert Kee’s The World We Left Behind shows that one can make up an interesting and agreeable book almost solely from this source. It isn’t ‘social history’, since, as it moves from 1 January 1939 to 31 December, it is largely concerned with ...”

“... was no suggestion that Mr McGregor was involved in the decision. Other former ministers such as Robert Jackson, Tim Yeo and Robert Key have obtained jobs since leaving the government. Earlier this year, the current Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and MP, Dame Angela Rumbold, was forced vigorously to defend her £12,000 ...”

“... Another drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a ...”

“... back to them in their own voices, thereby learning to soothe and to control.) Ackroyd loves his Mayhew catalogues, the peristalsis of the mob: ‘riots by sailors, silk-weavers, coal-heavers, hatters, glass-grinders’. Paragraphs rush breathlessly along like video presentation commentaries in the London Dungeon or the Globe Theatre. History whispering ...”

“... politics we got the PUP and the UDP. They have been joined by the barrister-turned-politician, Robert McCartney who, along with Conor Cruise O’Brien, founded the UKUP (that rogue ‘K’ is for ‘Kingdom’), to oppose further UUP sell-outs and the mayhem of a united Ireland. In last month’s Assembly elections there were also candidates who variously ...”

“... When the Cabinet was feuding over Westland, the Sun naturally backed her, and so when Patrick Mayhew, the Solicitor-General, told Michael Heseltine that his account of the rival bids might contain ‘material inaccuracies’, this confidential legal advice was immediately leaked to the Sun, whose sensitive and nuanced front-page account of the discussion ...”