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“... was as a political fait accompli. In the not so distant past this was the method used by Jack Straw, as foreign and Commonwealth secretary, to deprive the Chagos islanders of their right to return. It is no way to run a democracy, and it is to be hoped that in less febrile times the entire prerogative procedure will be made public. More dramatic than ...”

“... dedicated drunks still sing in the marketplace, and out the back there’s an old guy who knew Jack Kerouac. Spring in January now, of course: no doubt the daffs and daisies are already out and you lot, in the serene post-Christmas lull, biking the back roads between Hob and Schull. Here at the heure bleue in the Deux Magots where as a student I couldn’t ...”

“... of many genres and pseudonyms (Alexis K. Triffel, Virginia Lindisfarne, Jay C. Dacey), leaves her London life with its perpetual diets, its writing ‘squeezed in’ between domestic errands and maternal obligations, its dual enemies of ‘sleep and food’, to stay for a few weeks in the house of her friend Angèle’s mother in South-West France. Here she ...”

“... two dozen of them sailed every day except Sunday to previously hard to reach corners of the firth. London had its first sight of a steamboat when a Clyde-built ship (the Margery, launched in Dumbarton) arrived on the Thames in 1815; the next year it became the first to cross the English Channel and the first to be seen in Paris, where an excited crowd watched ...”

“... glimmers. The ‘intimate flux’ of Lou Kline’s thoughts on the morning of his trip to London with his daughter Roxy – Charlie’s half-sister; Kline was one of the men in the forest – is a comic assemblage of mundanities, distant sensory impressions, emotions and drives. We encounter his stream of consciousness from an older Roxy’s ...”

“... housing? (Riddoch herself believes in the power of small co-operatives.) Nobody supposes that a London government could tackle such work, or would want to. Some think that Salmond’s devolved Scottish government could make huge changes right now, without independence, if the will to confront established power were there. A man in Livingston said to ...”

“... inspired leadership, such as that of the elder Pitt, of superior fighting skills, such as those of Jack Tar, and of tactical brilliance, such as that of Marlborough, Wellington and Nelson. This reluctance to institutionalise war also helps explain why so little has been written on the domestic impact of Britain’s involvement in international ...”

“... and for once had not cooked any of it. Then she bought a plastic policeman’s hat and a Union Jack flag on a stick and had a picture taken in front of Big Ben for 50p. When she arrived home at 7 p.m. the police were waiting, called by her panicked eldest daughter. They suspected Emecheta had been at a boyfriend’s house and questioned the absconding ...”

“... glut of sweetmeats provoked a predictable backlash of anti-Petrarchan satire and parody. Among the London types lampooned by Thomas Nashe in Pierce Penniless (1592) is the second-rate sonneteer: ‘All Italianato is his talk … He will be an Inamorato poeta, & sonnet a whole quire of paper in praise of Lady Swinesnout, his yellow-faced mistress.’ In Joseph ...”

“... a little wrinkle in the love triangle involving Bellow, his then wife Sondra, and Sondra’s lover Jack Ludwig, also a member of the Bard English Department. Mustn’t there be, it was suggested, some ‘homosexual component’ – Atlas probably wants to say ‘homosocial’ – in the relationship between the two men? To explain this sort of arrangement, he ...”

“... In London, newsagents, sub-post offices and what used to be called grocers, with the three of them absorbed at times into a single unit, are now run almost exclusively by Asians. The same is true in other parts of Brittain: notably, Leicester, Coventry, Bradford, the West Midlands and some of the North-West. And this is just the most visible aspect of Asian business activity in this country ...”

“... much like being shipwrecked on the Tempest island of the Elephant and Castle; another chunk of London real estate serially overwhelmed by enlightened development. Reaching the end of my biblical allocation of years brought on something more troubling than Nick Cave’s midlife mirror interrogation, his 20,000 Days on Earth. Hurtling to oblivion around the ...”

“... attorneys who studiously passed through the corridor without comment, defence counsels Ira London and Adrian DiLuzio joked and postured before the cameras, showed off their expensive suits and coifs, and broadcast views of the case that were inadmissible in the courtroom. Most egregiously, London announced to the ...”

“... Five poets performed. Kenneth Rexroth, the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had ...”

“... Banks combined the enthusiasm and practical competence of one of O’Brian’s fictional heroes, Jack Aubrey, with the passion for natural history of another, Stephen Maturin. Moreover O’Brian’s accounts in his novels of 18th-century seamanship are, like Tolstoy’s battle pieces, better historical description than most historians manage: it was clear ...”