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“... Floor, the first novel in a multimillion-selling series with a notionally all-American hero, Jack Reacher. Reacher – no one in the books feels able to use his first name – hasn’t changed much since then. He’s got, if anything, more efficient and invulnerable, and he no longer passes dull moments by recalling blues recordings in high fidelity. In ...”

“... North. ‘Here are some things Charlie said were in short supply.’ The girl (Sissy Spacek) fixes Jack Lemmon with a pitying look. ‘Not any more,’ she says. The scarcities, like everything else, were politically conditioned.In one way, this strangulation of Chilean democracy was a jewel in the crown of those successful Washington-inspired military coups ...”

“... it was part of a Roman burial ground, an unclean extremity lying beyond the walls of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for ...”

“... on the bus too, and the man at the wheel was Neal Cassady, the legendary long-distance driver of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Stone was part of the Perry Lane crowd, but when the hijinks began to eat into his writing time he slipped away. Kesey’s voyage east with the Merry Pranksters was one of the signature moments of the decade, along with Altamont and ...”

“... Much to my surprise, Althusser got in touch with me and suggested that he should come to London and speak to my seminar. This he did. In the course of the seminar, he was asked why it was that he had not attacked the leadership of the Party in such an open and direct way before. Why had he not spoken out earlier (a reproach which Elleinstein was also ...”

“... Macleod distinguished himself by avoiding his colleagues’ ponderous circumlocutions. ‘Look, Jack,’ he said, ‘the basic question is: “Did you fuck her?” ’ Sadly, Profumo continued to try to lie his way out with mealy-mouthed statements about there being ‘no impropriety’. Wondrously, the Tory elders accepted this. Perhaps they thought ...”

“... chanting of verse. Foster has much quiet fun with the psalteries, and for good measure reproduces Jack Yeats’s satirical drawing of his brother explaining ‘speaking to the psaltery’ to an audience in the American Wild West. Nobody seemed to like what Shaw called the ‘nerve-destroying crooning’ this practice entailed, except of course the poet, who ...”

“... on the phone, Karel Reisz and his wife, Betsy Blair, were always at the centre of talk. The London Review decided to orchestrate a tribute to this most elegant and spirited of men, and immediately there was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads ...”

“... is not German, it is not surprising that Blake does not capitalize every noun in his poem ‘London’ (Songs of Experience). But then he does capitalise Man, Infants, Chimney-sweeper, Church, Soldier, Palace and Marriage. Why? The reader of a scholarly modern edition like that in the Longman English Poets series is not even in a position to realise that ...”

“... the temptation of saying too much. Crick quite often catches him doing so. In one of the wartime London Letters to Partisan Review Orwell reported that when the authorities tore down railings for scrap they ravaged working-class parks and squares but left upper-class ones alone. When his wife pointed out that this allegation was demonstrably false, he ...”

“... boy who passed up his place in art school for the chance to get at the city. Any city. But London would do for starters. That was the new life: transcription. Nights on the drift, clubtime noise, then the real high of turning experience, the very next morning, before it disappeared, into serviceable prose.) If everybody loved Penman on Paul ...”

“... first five editions of the paper but disappeared from the final one – the edition which went to London and was seen by Lord Kemsley, the Evening Chronicle’s proprietor. Kemsley had financial interests in the cotton industry. While the youthful Cudlipp was emerging as a man to watch, King was indulging his lifelong habit of feeling sorry for himself. He ...”

“... hadn’t already guessed. Inside, there’s an entity called Ali who lives in Spitalfields, East London: ‘The sign on the shop says VERDE, nothing more, but everyone knows that something strange goes on inside.’ (This building really exists, I noticed, on one of the streets by Spitalfields market. It’s a former greengrocer’s which seems to have been ...”

“... Early on, they single out their adversaries as, pre-eminently, Shula Marks, Geoff Berridge and Jack Spence. ‘For some scholars, no doubt, archival work is logistically too difficult or temperamentally uncongenial. Such must survive by their theorising, and hope to invent a concept which catches on. But history is too important to be left to the ...”

“... describes the consequences this decision had all over the world. Black activists in Paris, London and New York united across factional lines to challenge white rule in the Caribbean and fascist aggression in Africa, accompanied by all the classic acrimonies. At a 1935 meeting of the Comintern-backed Union des Travailleurs Nègres (UTN) to organise ...”