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“... believe Keith Colquhoun, and – best news of all – none of us need fear we are too far over the hill to find them. At the centre of his third novel, Kiss of Life, is ex-headmistress Miss Macgregor, experiencing the death-in-life of retirement in a seaside hotel. The horrors of extreme loneliness – the hoarding up of crumbs of conversation, the eking out ...”

“... It wasn’t a “follow me” message. It was a quizzical, satirical: “You too?”’This is how Rosemary Tonks retells her ghostly visitation in The Halt during the Chase (1972), the last book she published before she disappeared from public life, like a true poète maudit, only to re-emerge after her death in 2014, when a full collection of her poems ...”

“... I can only guess why Shirley Williams is carrying a copy of the News Chronicle, or why Jimmy Hill has an Arab headdress, or why Lord Home stands bat in hand before a broken wicket. Craig Brown says that in his caricatures Boxer mixed ‘the base and the suave’, but there is not a lot of baseness here, not much of the Rowlandson; and such fluent drawing ...”

“... can’t be looked straight in the eye: ‘each man fixed his eyes before his feet./Flowed up the hill and down King William Street’. This sampling outlines a familiar story about the modern city: it’s the place where the strength that was meant to come in numbers has been hollowed out or fractured. Carlyle saw London as ‘a huge aggregate of little ...”

“... is best exemplified by the claim in its tie-in novel that ‘the victory of Arthur at Badon Hill was so complete and so devastating that the Saxon army retreated for ever from Britain’ – which, if true, would mean that we must all be speaking Welsh to this day. Its grip on geography is if anything even worse. But the real point is that the film is ...”

“... a city whose other two well-known institutions are its cathedral and its awesome jail, where Rosemary West and an assortment of more than five hundred of the country’s Faces, murderers, arsonists and felons are currently detained. In Durham, the wicked can be punished, forgiven and studied without anyone having to leave town. Hobbs has been speaking to ...”

“... of written memorialisation. Pre-Roman relics are visible all over Britain – there are barrows, hill-forts, stone circles and chalk figures – and we can infer quite a lot about the people who made them: we can measure their skeletons, test the isotopes in their teeth to see if they were born nearby, and often establish how they died. But none of the ...”

“... the back of Blenheim Park. Here Rowse began collecting notes for a poem so I pointed out a great rosemary bush in flower to him and told him it was marjoram. I look forward to the published error. At North Leigh we saw Mr Hevesi gardening and hurried by (we hope) unseen. The Jacobean-Caroline rectory was beautiful with honeysuckle, clematis and lupins. The ...”

“... I wondered why nobody had looked him up.When I got home that evening I searched online for Dunlop Hill in Ballinasloe. ‘Dunlop hill is a hill in Dunlop, East Ayrshire,’ Google told me, but it also asked: ‘Did you mean: Dunlo ...”

“... wading through a pool of water in a blue dress. Another was of Hania, aged two, rolling down a hill of daisies by Ladbroke Grove.In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road ...”