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“... correspondent, Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow came a torrent of newsprint that set the popular tone for the last days of imperial Britain, the ‘second Elizabethan age’ that was half-thrilled and half-terrified by Britain’s endeavours to build its own hydrogen bombs and ...”

“... impertinent biographers through the courts (like J.D. Salinger). They will (like T.S. Eliot or Jack London) set up vigilant estates to stand like pyramids over the author’s reputation and defy any tomb-robbing researcher. They will themselves incinerate mountains of correspondence (as did Dickens) or enjoin survivors to do it for them (like ...”

“... bandit, an outlaw, a desperado. A thief is a tea-leaf. A robber ends up at the Old Bailey – the London Palladium of the nation’s courts – and gets a ten stretch. A thief appears before the beak at Old Street magistrate’s court and gets three months. A robber takes the girlfriend off to Longchamp for the weekend. A thief goes home to the wife in ...”

“... generation: I’d never come across a recreational drug, for example, before I left Glasgow for London in 1970, and I’m sure my dear parents never came across any at all. But, all in all, the notion is hard to contest that the 1960s was a transformative decade for most people in the Western world who lived through it. This made it majestic in retrospect ...”

“... banquet.’ In late adolescence Steinbeck evidently came under the spell of Martin Eden. Imitating Jack London, he dropped out of college (Stanford in Steinbeck’s case, Berkeley in London’s), went on the road as a hobo and made a rather fitful stab at running away to sea. Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold ...”

“... genre of horse (or dog) story uses the same kinds of voice and mind projection – think of Jack London – or even, as in the case of Black Beauty, is told in the ‘first person’ voice of the subject: ‘When I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass.’ In Seabiscuit the central figure’s consciousness is never as ...”

“... and the provocateur act as a vicious solvent on the very notion of fraternity, which is why Jack London once famously wrote that it was only when the Creator had perfected the snake, the rat and the toad that he began work on designing the scab.In an Edward Thompsonian echo, Seumas Milne reminds us of the British tradition of police espionage by ...”

“... would then walk behind the bogus cortège singing psalms. He knew all the main hearse drivers in London, and would visit undertakers to find out if there were any forthcoming funerals. He would then join the procession in his phaeton, driving so close as to scrape the wheels of the mourning coaches while laughing and shaking his whip. Admirably egalitarian ...”

“... it’) and Sunlight Soap.Ian Allan once had shops in Birmingham, Cardiff and Manchester as well as London; Glasgow had the Clyde Model Dockyard in the Argyll Arcade; Edinburgh still has Harburn Hobbies in Elm Row; and London, Manchester and Edinburgh all had branches of Bassett-Lowke, their windows filled with the finest and ...”

“... writing too freely to a publisher. Launched in 1909 the firm began with a general list, of which Jack London was a mainstay. Briefly on the strength were P.G. Wodehouse and Hugh Walpole. Gerald Mills was an intellectual who put up most of the money; it is his fate to become universally and perhaps immortally identified with a branch of literature which ...”

“... two-roomed cabin). Zadel was a journalist who had hung out at Lady Wilde’s literary salon in London and was so close to Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she signed letters to her ‘Mother’. She also appears to have been a medium, which talent she passed on to her second daughter-in-law (the ‘other woman’). When visited, her face, it was ...”

“... were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to see the gore, and to purloin souvenirs. The Victorians were not dainty in their interest, and journalists were seldom squeamish in their reporting. The Times of 4 January 1856, for example, described the inquest held at the Talbot Inn, Rugeley on the ...”

“... Of the two leading rivals for the London mayoralty, Ken Livingstone is much the more difficult to imagine as a child. Nobody, surely, can have that problem with Boris Johnson. The mind’s eye sees Boris as one of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, a bouncy fellow demanding his tea and laying plans ‘to be/the next Prime Minister but three ...”

“... Jack Yeats’s paintings are much admired and, it appears, universally loved. I recall a large show of them a few years ago at the National Gallery in Dublin. I have rarely seen people looking at paintings with such evident pleasure. Admittedly, the show was in Dublin, and Yeats is deemed to be Ireland’s greatest painter, so those who stood before the choice paintings were prejudiced in their favour ...”

“... The keeping of diaries prompts the question why, and for whom? James Boswell at 22, and going to London for the first time, piously hoped that keeping a diary might engender ‘a habit of application and improve me in expression’, possibly even ‘make me more careful to do well’. At all events, 24 pages of this self-imposed devoir were sent off each Tuesday to his friend John Johnston of Grange, a dullish youth of about Boswell’s own age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone ...”