“... 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 ...”

“... once he left the scene, but here too things didn’t work out as planned. In 1967, Robert Hill, an editor at Pope’s American publisher, J.B. Lippincott, decided to give another writer he’d spotted a chance to fill the gap in the market. He wrote to Patrick O’Brian, who duly signed a contract headed: ‘Untitled novel about an 18th-century naval ...”

“... papers). Valerie Eliot has now allowed the entire notebook to be published, superbly edited by Christopher Ricks, whose T.S. Eliot and Prejudice is still the most acute and fine-grained investigation of the vexed question of the place of prejudice in Eliot’s writing.It is impossible to over-praise Ricks’s work in this edition. His annotations draw on ...”

“... and republican racists like Adams all found the Germania indispensable. In A Most Dangerous Book, Christopher Krebs, a young German Latinist who teaches at Harvard, tells part of this complicated story with wit, economy and learning. He carefully describes how Tacitus served Rome as a senator and governor. But the bulk of his attention goes to the ...”

“... figures who crossed confessional boundaries and betrayed their masters more than once. Another was Christopher Marlowe, whose casual employment by Walsingham in 1587 and sordid murder in Deptford six years later, has fuelled a minor literary industry. Surprisingly, Cooper doesn’t mention Henry Fagot, a key figure in his intelligence-gathering activities ...”

“... the Ossianic fragments now we often hear in them the voices of later poets. ‘Who cometh from the hill, like a cloud tinged with the beam of the west? Whose voice is that, loud as the wind, but pleasant as the harp of Carry1?’ To these questions from the fourth fragment, I’m tempted to answer that the voice is that of Walt Whitman, the great self-styled ...”

“... Enthusiasts would drive to the village of Boughton after nightfall just to park at the top of the hill and watch in amazement as the lorries hauled themselves up and out of the village, shattering the night with blazing lights and roaring engines – and, as was surely registered by the Tolkien-addled hippies among the nocturnal onlookers, with all the ...”

“... hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the fact. The phrase ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... known at all, as one of a group of youngish Conservatives who had been christened ‘the Notting Hill set’ by Derek Conway, an MP from a rival faction. In this context, Notting Hill, where Cameron and many of his friends live, connotes wealth, organic food, possible drugginess and a degree of social ...”

“... rare direct comment on dress, but since the novel is a parody the remark is ironic, as defined by Christopher Ricks, in that it is both true and not true to the same extent at the same time. ‘Woman is fine for her satisfaction alone,’ Austen writes. ‘No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it.’ In parody the text works ...”

“... Alcmanics (or is it Alcaics?) – and one of the few to describe our current impoverishments. Christopher Reid’s interrogation of language expresses itself in an interest in translationese. Katerina Brac seems to have arisen from a long immersion in Oxford and Penguin books of verse in translation. Its language is a kind of anti-dialect – English, but ...”

“... market. When oil was discovered near some vacant lots she had bought on the west slope of Signal Hill, her gamble seemed to have paid off. She clubbed together with the other local owners to discuss a joint sale. Sinclair accompanied her to ‘many disputatious meetings’ and took notes. The greed displayed by some of the owners – who argued that their ...”

“... the millennial gift books already piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of Christopher Ricks’s successor to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly ...”

“... experiencing of them, should have enjoyed elaborate articulation in recent years. Both Said and Christopher Norris mention aspects of this, but they’ve obviously missed an article in a theory journal which called for a comprehensive ‘taxonomy of literary experiences’, expressly designed as a sort of manual of textual intercourse, and intended ‘(like ...”