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“... It gets me every time. That hallucinatory instant. Da da da da da, da da. The Pearly Queen drill of the EastEnders signature tune, as the map spins and the known world is stood on its head; what you thought was the blunt lingam of the Isle of Dogs is revealed as the East Greenwich peninsula. That vertiginous, and slightly desperate, readjustment of consciousness is what you face as you emerge, high on diesel fumes, road rage and subterranean paranoia, from the tiled bore of the Blackwall Tunnel ...”

“... alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for £6. Gardeners and all-purpose open-air labourers were supposed to get around, between tea shack and workstation, on bicycles. Some students, anarchists and crusty food-for-free survivalists also chose to ...”

“... a nice red apple down the tunnel at Acton,’ the official storyteller for the Super Sewer told me, ‘it would roll all the way to Chambers Wharf, the shaft beyond Tower Bridge.’ This gigantic pipe, a 7.2-metre-wide triumph of civil engineering, as spookily lit and smooth-skinned as the underground redoubt of the latest world-dominating Bond ...”

“... a world of covert obscenity: ‘I took a slice of white bread from the basket and put it on my plate upside down so that it looked just like a pale toddler’s bum, even more convincing when partly spread with chocolate spread, which never failed to amuse me and my brothers, and ...”

“... were going to hunt dogs, Victoria Park wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Those dogs stayed with me when I left for Athens. I had seen film footage shot two years after the 2004 Games, of loping beasts, freelance canine caretakers patrolling the overgrown wilderness of the futurist sculpture park that once surrounded the Olympic complex out at ...”

“... observed, Boswell ‘was a man whom no one could respect, and whom few could help liking’. Mr Royle succeeds where most have failed, and I find that strange, for Boswell was, manifestly, an Edinburgh figure: born there, schooled there, a city advocate, Kames’s protégé. Francis Jeffrey, a boy in 1790, once helped carry the intoxicated Boswell to ...”

“... horrors he described have gone. Part of Bainbridge’s problem with the present is the past: All my parents’ bright days had ended before I was born. They faced backwards. In so doing they created within me so strong a nostalgia for time gone that I have never been able to appreciate the present or look to the ...”

“... no-show show, the perfect way of emptying rooms and secret spaces, slaughterhouse cellars, former banks, the struck sets of the Industrial Revolution. This art is designed to repel browsers. The private view or first night piss-up is the event. The rooms are then too crowded to allow anyone near the exhibits. After that, the show has a posthumous, hangdog ...”

“... owned by Tata Motors of India, BMW owns Mini and Rolls-Royce, Volkswagen owns Bentley, while the MG is owned by Nanjing Automobile Group of China – which might be one of the things that explains a degree of loose wiring in the English nationalist brain. In any event, when it comes to cars, the country is secretly obsessed with its supposed manufacturing ...”

“... operations. Or the present hunger for natural gas. ‘A lot of public land,’ Snyder told me, ‘has to be converted, in the most organised fashion, into hundreds and thousands of gas wells. It’s like the original oil era. They’ve tricked a lot of public land by offering inducements that haven’t been followed up on. It’s rocks and hard places ...”

“... faded CGI panoramas of satisfied customers who never lived in the world as we know it. So? I’m trying to teach myself the grammar of a terminated city in which every sentence begins with a confident clearing of the throat: ‘So …’ That’s the entry code. It’s as if you’ve been shoved onstage, without lines, in a play you’ve never read. Smile ...”

“... the early days, before the tent was erected, and I was intrigued, a year on, when the LRB offered me the chance of a second visit, to see how work was progressing. I duly reported my shoe size (which hadn’t changed much since the previous trip) and the registration number of my car ...”

“... felt cradled by this bare soil,’ Chiara Ambrosio, a filmmaker and anthropologist, told me, ‘contained and absorbed by it, a place of origin and convergence.’ When the surface of the world is so overloaded with competing narratives, with shrill boasts hung from every blue fence and plastered over buses and police cars and refuse trucks, there is ...”

“... I had hoped for a woodwose and would have settled for a wolf, but found golf courses instead. My Ordnance Survey map told me there were 14 on the peninsula, which is now a suburb of Liverpool flanked by the rivers Dee and Mersey. The anonymous Gawain poet tells us that in this place, ‘Wonde þer bot lyte/þat auþer ...”

“... blood between the rival Leave organisations. Leave.eu is financed by the insurance tycoon Arron Banks and blessed by Nigel Farage and Ukip. Vote Leave is led by Michael Gove, Gisela Stuart and Boris Johnson, with the support of other longstanding Eurosceptic ministers and former ministers, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel ...”