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“... mythology to sustain it – nothing much beyond the hopeless romanticism of Bannockburn and Prince Charlie, mixed with a sour economic complaint and an annual celebration on the terraces of Wembley or Hampden. Clearly, this nationalism was something felt in the bones of the people. And so we held our breath, watching as Scotland moved, it seemed, relentlessly ...”

“... is a delightful town, well worth a visit. The Castle, still in use as a prison, stands on a hill and you can look across the valley of the Lune to Morecambe Bay. Pevsner, 1969 edition, says that the 18th-century Music Room is irredeemably lost. Not at all. Enlightened citizens of Lancaster, stung by Pevsner’s reproaches, have restored the Music Room ...”

“... the singing clowns who fail to amuse Baudelaire’s bored young prince reappear in Moore as Elvis, Charlie Chaplin, Dylan Thomas, Louis Armstrong, Brenda Lee or Spike Milligan. It’s now the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, Biafra, Mosley and the fashionable dramas of ‘Kitchen-Sink Sade-Marats’ whose atrocious crimes fail to turn the green waters of Lethe lying ...”

“... he would normally alight. By High Street Kensington, he has taken the seat opposite; by Notting Hill Gate, he is at her elbow. ‘The extraordinary part of the matter,’ James observes, ‘was that they were not in the least meeting where they had left off, but ever so much further on, and that these added links added still another between High Street and ...”

“... or south, stand out against the French coast. Nicolas Deshayes – an artist who lives on the hill, just below Henry II’s magnificent 12th-century castle, the largest in England – revels in the spectacle of choreographed movement. He makes works that reference water: vast bodies of it, along with drains, pipes and other signs of liquid urban ...”

“... Routledge’s dislike of Mandelson is a consequence of his trade unionism and his friendship with Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown’s former press officer. The Chancellor might appear to outsiders as the willing servant of a free-market consensus which has cracked in those parts of the world – roughly one-third – currently in recession and worse, but to ...”

“... in Brooklyn. Copeland allowed children to go to school, but he banned them from theatres. When Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms came to New York in October, Harold Edel, the manager of the Strand Theatre, wrote: ‘We think it a most wonderful appreciation of Shoulder Arms that people should veritably take their lives in their hands to see it.’ Edel was ...”

“... Gene taught dance until, according to a local woman, ‘practically every child in the Squirrel Hill neighbourhood wanted to attend his classes.’ Gene Kelly’s Studio of the Dance was set up in Johnstown, and every year it staged revues with names like Gene Kelly’s Kiddie’s Vodvil. Much later, in 1945, Kelly choreographed and starred in Anchors ...”

“... this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring bonded over primal naughtiness. It has been spelled out frequently in the underground literature that ...”

“... until the city conforms to his reading of it. No longer able to potter out into Notting Hill to check on some detail, he is in the position that Robin Cook found himself in when, working in a vineyard in the South of France, he decided to reinvent himself as ‘Derek Raymond’. Raymond’s late London novels are pure wish fulfilment, breeze-block ...”

“... Committee’s long-suffering representative at last got the damn thing out of Lewis’s Notting Hill studio and into a taxi than he asked for it back. O’Keeffe’s emphasis on conditions rather than qualities looks like a deliberate choice. He has abstained throughout not only from assessment, but from anything other than the most cursory description of ...”

“... set of shining white blocks built in 2007 as part of Labour’s PFI programme. As well as Farage, Charlie Leys, the sixth-former who had organised and was chairing the event, had managed to pull in South Thanet’s sitting Tory MP, Laura Sandys, a believer in EU membership who is standing down at the next election, and the candidates from Labour, the Liberal ...”

“... and a word from Yeats: ‘The dawn moved along the rim of the mountains and as I went down’ the hill felt the new day come up around me and felt life begin once more its ancient, ceaseless gyre.’ The trouble is that O’Faolain, on his hero’s behalf, is trying to make me feel more, and more tenderly, than anything the story compels me to feel. He is ...”

“... Lucas’s personal Anglophobia, nor by the nickname bestowed on him by the British troops, Corncob Charlie – he was a ‘proper Charlie’, a born fool.Further down​ the chain of command, Americans and Brits mingled much more amicably. According to the letters he sent my mother, my father went hobnobbing with his ...”

“... wildly from the thunder-cloud … and rush, in far-spread disorder, over the spacious face of the hill’.Some of those spectators – perhaps most of them – hadn’t come to see history made but to pick its pocket. O’Keeffe is at his best when he discusses the ancient and apparently ineradicable urge to plunder the dead. Achilles did it; the Bayeux ...”