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“... has cut great roads through the causes célèbres of the bien pensants. Where are we now? Joe Hill probably guilty as charged, according to Wallace Stegner. Sacco and Vanzetti darker horses than we thought. The Rosenbergs at least half-guilty. Most of the Black Panthers (always excepting those murdered by the FBI) amazingly guilty. The McNamara brothers ...”

“... figure upon a lettered coin, made strangely comfortable for us by being (in the words of Geoffrey Hill about a coin of Offa) ‘cushioned on a legend’. Not exactly eclipsed by Ehrenpreis’s biography, but necessarily rather occluded by it, are three recent books on Swift. F.P. Lock’s Swift’s Tory Politics draws ‘freely’ on Ehrenpreis’s first two ...”

“... was also an Albanian from Kosovo. There was a Jew among the entrenchment-diggers on Hum Hill, Colonel Jovan Divjak, deputy commander of the Bosnian Army, is a Serb. I shook his hand as he walked, with a Serbo-Croat aide-de-camp named Srdjan Obradovic (‘Obradovic is a multinational name’), through the nervous pedestrians on the edge of the Old ...”

“... of emphasis on personal appearance, almost as if he had no talent’, though Terry Wogan and Harry Hill are commended more warmly. He signs off with a bulletin on his Pacific War novel: he might not live to write it, but ‘I would not be able to do the things I do now, and might do next, if I had not done those other things first.’ All the same, there’s a ...”

“... in which Anglican controversies play out in India; an unfinished draft was later published as The Hill Station (1981). On 11 August, fishing for his supper from a rock, as he’d started doing most afternoons, he was swept into Bantry Bay at the beginning of a storm and drowned, aged 44. This book, J.G. Farrell in His Own Words, a selected letters and diaries ...”

“... are otherwise uninterpretable. If we start presuming that, inter alia, Douglas Dunn, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and James Fenton are absent because Davie thinks they play no significant part in this history, then what are we to make of the omissions of J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, heroes of Davie’s earlier ...”

“... the start of his career was part of the postwar rediscovery of what was left of rural England. Christopher Hussey, introducing the second edition of Stroud’s book, described its ‘main impulse’ as the ‘growing concern with problems of country planning, preservation of scenery, and relation of buildings to their setting’. He might have added the ...”

“... pas de téléphone.’ In England his friends included Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore and Christopher Wood. He never met the self-taught Cornish painter Alfred Wallis but supported him and bought his work. It was at the Edes’ dinner table that Moore and Barbara Hepworth had their famous argument about which of them was the first to put a hole in a ...”

“... however, professors of literature who think we should rather go along with or encourage change. Christopher Ricks writes on clichés, contesting the common view that their prevalence is a sign of decadence: since we can’t beat them, he says, we ought to join them, or rather change them and use them in surprising ways, like the poets Geoffrey ...”

“... instead of “black”? – you remember that night – you had Albert Hill laughing so hard, I thought he was going to die, and he liked Jesse.’ ‘Well,’ said the mayor, cocking his head and smiling more knowingly than ever, ‘times change. Times change, times change, and the polls change.’ ‘The polls?’ ‘The ...”

“... With the dread words ‘government’ and ‘regulation’ banned from the lexicon of the Hill, we have not entered an era of blissed-out libertarianism. Instead, lobbyists and fat cats are actually writing the legislation, rather than just pushing for it. The New York Times recently ran a front-page story its own reporter could hardly believe, about ...”

“... became a lifelong devotee of ‘its plain narrative, its picture of life as a pilgrimage over hill and dale, where surprising adventures lurked by the wayside, a hard road with now and then long views to cheer the traveller’. There were happy, outdoorsy times in upper Tweeddale, the birthplace of his mother, Helen. A cultured uncle introduced him to ...”

“... Express. At his journey’s end Freud hobbled out into the garden of his rented house in Primrose Hill, threw up his arms in admiration of the view of Regent’s Park and the City of London, and said: ‘I am almost tempted to cry out “Heil ...”

“... the Lord make it like that of New England. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.’ The Puritan separatists were the first to try to realise a dream that recurs like a refrain in American history: what FitzGerald calls ‘starting over’ or rebuilding the world from scratch. Winthrop’s utopian ...”

“... her workmate Matthew Weeks in 1844 (several thousand people turned up to watch him hang); and of Christopher Atkinson, vicar of Danby in Cleveland, who walked 140,000 miles to visit his parishioners and to carry out his own investigations. Atkinson wrote an observant account of his moorland charges (with chapter headings like ‘Bee Customs and ...”