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“... that group into crisis and most of Hobsbawm’s fellow-travellers (E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill) left the party then or soon afterwards. Hobsbawm did not, concluding that the Soviet invasion, however agonising, was a necessary step in light of the danger of counter-revolution: ‘If we had been in the position of the Soviet government, we should have ...”

“... also talked about Fisher’s ideas for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in ...”

“... arriving train was heavily congested and the unaccustomed Tory – who may or may not have been Alan Clark – recoiled from the throng revealed by the opening doors, suggesting that they might do better to walk along the platform to the restaurant car. Jeffrey Archer may have dreamed of routes as straight as an executive jet’s runway, but McKie knows ...”

“... here, and a dank basement was converted into an opium den for Johnny Depp in the film version of Alan Moore’s From Hell. The war memorial remains off-limits while the conversion takes place that will magic the former servants’ quarters into luxury apartments for the Manhattan Loft Corporation and the rest into a flagship Marriott hotel. St Pancras is not ...”

“... Windsor was of course born in Shoreditch, before escaping to the wannabe suburb of Stamford Hill. Hoxton and Shoreditch were on the wrong side of the Roman wall, a dog-end territory of street markets and unlicensed boxers. The 1990s had seen the area – birthplace of Lenny ‘The Guv’nor’ McLean, the Kray Twins et al – mutate from a criminous ...”

“... under great pressure.’ But what really made me sit up straight was his remark about Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Annunciations’, the last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I ...”

“... wading through a pool of water in a blue dress. Another was of Hania, aged two, rolling down a hill of daisies by Ladbroke Grove.In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road ...”

“... with his old comrades Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin. ‘The Labour Party,’ he wrote with Alan O’Shea, ‘may be busy developing alternative policies, but there’s no sign that it is breaking with the neoliberal framing of debates … Rather, it is nervously responding to polls which frame their questions within this neoliberal agenda.’ And he ...”

“... civic leader and a little girl named Shirley Jean Bersie who lived in the artist’s Potrero Hill neighbourhood and liked to visit him and watch him draw. Most of Rizzoli’s drawings include captions and other pieces of text, invariably rendered in beautiful hand-drawn lettering reminiscent of early 20th-century municipal signage and Fancy ...”

“... those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly employed on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the culverted Hackney ...”

“... concluded that Britain could be more free-market than America. He had a powerful ally in Alan Walters, Thatcher’s economic adviser, and when it came to the first of the big privatisations – the sale of British Telecom – Littlechild was commissioned to come up with new rules for governing the private companies on which the country would depend ...”

“... the Narcissus, which had Joseph Conrad as its second mate; the Grace Harwar, which took Alan Villiers round Cape Horn; the Moshulu, up whose rigging the 19-year-old Eric Newby climbed on the last grain race from Australia. All were three or four-masted barques: one or two Port Glasgow yards specialised in this last generation of big sailing ships ...”

“... semi in a street of similar houses between the town centre and the fields of sheep further up the hill. We met later in a café by the harbour. Outside, a bed of hardy municipal flowers clustered low and tight against the chill. Every so often a car went by. We weren’t the only customers, but a sense of surplus space and time, an absence of hustle and ...”

“... they had fled before, and knew that the survivors were the ones who got away first. The journalist Alan Moorehead, seeing off his wife and small daughter, saw a Czech Jew who had been barred from a train try to commit suicide on the platform.Micheline and the girls reached Port Said at sunset, in time to see the Queen Elizabeth being coaled, one line of locals ...”