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“... blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him ...”

“... of his life was spent at the margins of power, first as the rebel leader of anti-Vichy forces in London and Algiers, and then, between 1946 and his return to office in 1958, as a brooding absence in French political life. Removing himself from view the better to be seen was both a tactic and a strategy, as Sudhir Hazareesingh argues in a fascinating study of ...”

“... Mozambique’ and is one of the three original long poems in the book. Datelined ‘Tokyo 1942 – London 1946’, it should now be seen, I think, as one of the outstanding poems of the war, even though it is less concerned with fighting than with just sitting around waiting. Exiles traditionally eat bitter bread, but the narrator is more concerned to reflect ...”

“... cases and tripod of a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less ...”

“... the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin literary men’ with the family. He later wrote of ‘the Britisher’s jealousy of art and artists, which is generally dormant but called into activity when the artist has gone outside his field ...”

“... I think it more likely that Orwell, an old Etonian and a writer who, in Down and Out in Paris and London, worries that his accent will instantly discover him as a gentleman, is transferring his own attitudes to Kipling. After all, Orwell is not a reliable reader of Kipling’s poetry: faced with the dove-tailed ironies of ‘The Winners’, its ...”

“... the criminal biographies that make up Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices, a poor apprentice (like Jack Shepherd, the apprentice-turned-criminal whose case he considers) was tied into a situation with no future. For Rawlings, the biographies of 18th-century criminals fulfilled important functions of explanation and negotiation; they acted as a warning to the ...”

“... and the poster-paint. And I took part in a good-sized punch-up outside the American Embassy in London, thus disproving (as a pamphlet of the time pointed out) Lady Bracknell’s piercing words in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to ...”

“... was already routine: British visitors making crawling Stalinist speeches, Chinese guests in London insulting Labour MPs as tools of Wall Street imperialism. Instead, Zhou went for the Labour Party (now in opposition), although its leadership was fiercely opposed to Communism at home and abroad and was soon to commit its reluctant membership to ...”

“... his famously deformed foot, his abandonment virtually at birth by his profligate father, ‘Mad Jack’, his temperamental mother and the sexual attentions of a Calvinist nursemaid. When he wrote in the preface to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that he wanted to ‘show that early perversion of mind and morals leads to satiety of past pleasures and ...”

“... plague-struck and famine-ridden, saw university-trained men moving faute de mieux into the new London theatres, underpaid but not (most of them) actually starving. The 16th-century Rise of the Word has a second and intellectually rather different aspect. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 as a moderate Protestant, she made sure at her accession to ...”

“... hasn’t merely equivocated about the architecture of such notorious concretised dark stars as London’s Thamesmead and Robin Hood Gardens, or Sheffield’s Park Hill: he has been a passionate proselytiser. Thamesmead’s isolation and the GLC’s policy of dumping tenants on the estate may have been a strong impetus to downward mobility, but nothing ...”

“... the Clan Grant, who was living in reduced circumstances in Putney, but most of the rest kept smart London establishments in Mayfair or Regent’s Park; they simply no longer wanted a country house. Land management was time-consuming and increasingly uneconomical, staff were getting harder to find and upkeep was expensive. As transport became easier and faster ...”

“... A General History of the Pyrates, a two-volume compendium of pirates and their deeds published in London in 1724, which is credited to a ‘Captain Johnson’ but is usually thought to have been written by Defoe. The book provides detailed accounts of such infamous buccaneers as Henry Avery and ‘Calico ...”

“... abbey in St Albans: it showed the time, the position of the stars and the state of the tides at London Bridge. Time was movement and flux, and the sea revealed its regular rhythm; if the tides ceased, time was out of joint. ‘What is time?’ St Augustine wondered. ‘Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm explore the many ...”