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“... Shortly after the Sunday Times’s enforced move into the London Docklands, David Blundy and Jon Swain were strolling towards the new production plant’s heavily-guarded entrance. These two foreign correspondents are used to witnessing military activity (you may remember Swain as a character in Roland Joffe’s movie, The Killing Fields), but they were astonished to see an armoured car with a full complement of Royal Marines apparently patrolling inside the heavily-fortified perimeter fence ...”

“... books, Doing the Business, contained the helpful observation that the only Robin Hoods in East London were pubs and he brings the same sardonic approach to this account of ne’er-do-wells and worse. He opens with perhaps the most inviting come-on line of any recent book about crime: ‘The idea for this book began when several people informed me that my ...”

“... of the World War, Magnus Hirshfeld, ‘a Jewish physician with literary interests’, refers to London’s ‘orgiastic outgrowths’, its nudist clubs and ‘playgrounds for narcotic addicts’. Opium, heroin and cocaine were available over chemists’ counters: newspapers were aghast at the antics of ‘Snow Snifters’. Much later, dining with pop stars ...”

“... about sex and pain, but the theme is certainly present in McQueen’s work, from the notorious ‘Jack the Ripper’ student show to ‘It’s Only a Game’ (2005) to the bondage allusions (horses’ bits, braces, straps, harnesses, hoods, masks and piercings). McQueen himself made a series of comments about women which have the candour that won him many ...”

“... got a legit website, great reviews. The girls Skype with Mark Price, a handsome man in a busy London office, and he arranges their transport. Except there is, we soon learn, no Mark Price, the website and testimonials are fake, the busy office is just a clever camera angle and a sound recording, and the girls are on their way to sex ...”

“... cater for young men any more, unless they’re transvestites or slaves. Blokes under forty are all Jack-my-lads who think their pricks are bloody priceless.’ The types who went to her in Streatham all had one reason or another to feel out of the mainstream of sexual conduct. Even those who didn’t want a beating would probably not have had the cheek to turn ...”

“... from Niger was false – based, it turned out, on forged documents passed on to Washington and London by the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI? How did it happen that the intelligence services of the US and the UK got the story of Iraq’s WMD so badly wrong? Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo provide some clues in three articles in La ...”

“... Children’s Home, on the doorstep of her digs on Highbury Fields. It is 1944. Philip is living in London, dodging the flying bombs, occasionally visiting Emma (a motherly soul who makes no demands on him), working as an office boy, writing poetry. He finds a better job with Eric Sly, a court reporter who has a dingy office in one of the cells beneath ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd ...”

“... collaborators, a conspiracy of the unheard, and with one man in particular, the sharp-witted London activist Stewart Home.Home, in stark contrast to the brothers on the Celtic fringe, was a dynamo of invention, recycling Dadaist provocation into fugues of inspired counter-terror, then moving on. A suspicion lingers in the scorch marks that Home’s major ...”

“... I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of ...”

“... his sixth island gyration in 1998, aged 74. Deakin’s journey takes him on to Cambridge, where Jack Overhill, the author of 33 unpublished novels, was the first person to promote the previously unknown style known as the ‘crawl’, having seen someone doing it in the Granta. Overhill noticed that the swimmer was outpacing a racing punt, and that instead ...”

“... I was born in London on the 20th of May, 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of The History of British India.’ The father-author thus announced at the beginning of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography dominated his life from early childhood on. Did he in any sense author his son’s life as he authored his books? John Stuart Mill wrote his own Life in large part to work out an answer to that question ...”

“... assigned on grounds of his subject-matter to the naturalist tradition of Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, James T. Farrell and Wright, Algren departs from these writers in his prose; Malcolm Cowley called him a ‘poet of the Chicago slums’. All Algren’s losers have tales to tell, flights of fancy that fail to get them out of trouble. At the ...”

“... novel under a male pseudonym (‘a searing novel of grace under pressure by former sergeant Jack Schaeffer’): I suspect it would be experienced as a radically different work. Buffalo Afternoon chronicles forty-odd years in the life of Pete Bravado, a third-generation Italo-American born into working class Brooklyn. Bravado’s early aspirations are ...”