Rosemary Hill

While his men were getting into position, he noticed that something was blocking the elevation of the machine gun on the front of his armoured car. He got out to fix it, taking the opportunity to ‘seize the barrel from in front and give it a good wiggle’. As recounted in his autobiography, the incident unfolds in a laconic slow motion: ‘I realised that it had started firing. No sooner had I noticed this than I observed with dismay that it was firing into my chest. Moving aside pretty sharpish, I walked to the back of the armoured car and lay down.’ Six bullets had gone through him, inflicting injuries that compromised his health for the rest of his life and contributed to his early death at the age of 61 in 2001. The journalism with which he made his name took essentially the same approach.

My friend Katy​ used to be fat: not medically obese, but what our mothers would have called ‘pleasantly plump’ with a wink and a remark to the effect that ‘men like something to get hold of.’ But to our generation she looked fat, so she went on a diet and lost weight. This gave her access to more fashionable clothes, but it also changed her relationship with her...

Among scientists perhaps only Stephen Hawking has given his admirers such a strong feeling that they knew him personally. Strangers wrote with random queries, such as why do pigeons fly in circles, and anecdotes of animal behaviour: R.M. Middleton of West Hartlepool explained how he had managed to house-train his parakeet. Not all the letters were answered, but an impressive number were. Only once, on a letter from the Prague-born astronomer Anton Schobloch, who wanted to know ‘how is it possible, that there are hemaphrodits’ [sic] did Darwin go so far as to write ‘fool’ at the top in blue crayon.

In​ the early 1970s, an archive came to light containing what seemed to be the work of a forgotten Victorian photographer called Francis Hetling. His photographs, somewhat in the style of Lewis Carroll, gave a feeling of everyday life in the 19th century. It was decided to rescue him from obscurity with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1974. All was going well until a...

The present queen​ was not the only person to feel, when her grandmother Queen Mary died in 1953, that she ‘could not imagine a world without her’. The ‘old queen’, as she was generally known to the public, had become a totemic figure, rigidly upright in her toque and pearls, a grandmother to the nation. Her daughter-in-law, the queen mother, later fulfilled the same...