“... short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet, Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hour With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. The novel at a crucial point reaches the same mood as well as the identical locale; and Stetson’s corpses ‘planted last year in your ...”

“... one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his work: Fulcrum, Oasis Books, Pig Press, Galloping Dog, Paladin, Slow Dancer, North and South, Leafe Press, Shearsman. These ...”

“... also thinks I ought to move with George Christian – get LBJ to use his influence to turn off the Hill investigation with Califano, Hubert and so on. Later in the day, he decided that wasn’t such a good idea, and told me not to do it, which I fortunately hadn’t done. Mitchell was then Attorney-General, De Loach was an FBI agent, Gray was Director of the ...”

“... to concede black Americans their natural rights as citizens, and used his coercive power on the Hill to this explicit end: the first time in history that such clout had ever been employed in that way. He threw away much of this gain by pursuing Kennedy’s fantasy of standing tall in Indo-China (where the military Neanderthals like Curtis LeMay, who had ...”

“... lonely women are brought to ruin by a manipulative man. By then, towns like Hassocks and Burgess Hill have taken on an almost occult significance, as have alcohol, prostitution, the theatre, cheap accommodation, Fascism, golf, motor vehicles, moustaches, and the use of out-of-date slang. Most readers’ first entry into this claustrophobic world is by way of ...”

“... since the time of his deposition in 1399, but is it right? In his new study of Richard’s reign, Christopher Fletcher argues that, far from exhibiting boyish or feminine characteristics, as his enemies alleged, Richard strove to live up to contemporary ideas about how a man should behave. In many ways he was a conventionally ‘manly’ king. The charge that ...”

“... on prayer and scripture, or dutifully took their pews and harrumphed about it. Archer’s parents, Christopher and Mary, were recusants, fined for their obstinacy, but this wasn’t so heinous or uncommon in Reformation England. It’s easy to imagine some friend or relative of the old faith slipping a sacred token into one of their graves.Their son ...”

“... Millennium Experience, set ablaze. Flames visible across the river from Beckton Alp to Parliament Hill. ‘A man said to have a slight Irish accent said: “This is the IRA. We have planted bombs at the southern entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. For goodness sake, do something about it. We want the area cleared.”’ So Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian ...”

“... The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’ That’s the way a former MI6 operative who wrote the notorious dossier alleging collusion between Trump and Putin introduced himself at a debate at the Cambridge Union last October. ‘And as you can see, sir,’ he told the union president to giggles from the audience, ‘tonight I’ve come dressed in my usual work clothes: black dinner jacket and the signature James Bond Omega watch ...”

“... had their high-culture connections, if only through such lofty sponsors as Wilfred Mellers and Christopher Ricks. And other reasons will doubtless be adduced as to why they are all relevant to the theme of this book. Still, as the Introduction remarks, ‘many things had to go if this book were not to be an impenetrable thicket of names and ...”

“... known as ‘the Ingen’, and the enlargement of an old duck-pond near the top of Islington Hill to serve as a reservoir. It was there that the official opening took place on Michaelmas Day 1613, celebrated by marches, music and a roll-call of the various craftsmen involved, written in bad verse by the poet Thomas Middleton. The reservoir was soon ...”

“... until the city conforms to his reading of it. No longer able to potter out into Notting Hill to check on some detail, he is in the position that Robin Cook found himself in when, working in a vineyard in the South of France, he decided to reinvent himself as ‘Derek Raymond’. Raymond’s late London novels are pure wish fulfilment, breeze-block ...”

“... I will not name him. Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they got off a train from Birmingham New Street which connected with the ferry to Belfast. A sixth man, Hughie Callaghan, was arrested the next day ...”

“... had brightened his hair with a blue rinse. As we were standing together on a corner in Notting Hill Gate by a red postbox, Philip Roth and I were talking when an Englishman I knew came towards us in the crowd, and I wanted him to see me talking with Philip Roth, but he didn’t see us, and walked past. In one scene – they are all scenes – Plante is in ...”

“... and accumulate so many tiny shrubs that, in our opinion, the outline of the forest is lost. Our Christopher Sykes set the tone in 1975 when he described the (American) Evelyn Waugh Newsletter as ‘overloaded with pedantic debate about trifles’. I have not seen the Newsletter’s review of his official biography, but one American claimed to have counted ...”