“... something of a shock.’ In​ 1951, Carter passed the 11-plus and won a funded place at Streatham Hill and Clapham High, a girls-only direct-grant grammar school. She wrote about ‘the glum, sullen loathing that overcame me’ as she ‘daily slouched and dawdled’ her way there, and how much she hated maths and PE. But she was great at English and French ...”

“... that we attend PT wearing all our ‘kit’, except blankets. (I will never call a child of mine Christopher.) The same letter gives, incidentally, a clear view of the left-wing political position that Reed, for all his aristocratic fantasies, was never to abandon: ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘a good deal from Russia, of course, but rather joylessly: the ...”

“... or the demonstrative. Here David Trotter comes into his own, having learned (I would guess from Christopher Ricks) how such apparently neutral and instrumental parts of speech – including prepositions, ‘in’ and ‘into’, ‘with’ and ‘amid’ and ‘among’ – exert, when used by an accomplished writer, far more powerful suasive force than ...”

“... gates are opened by the guard: behind it, through a lush ornamental garden, a road corkscrews up a hill – security proscribed a straight road to the dictator – between palms and soft lamps. A clutch of buildings is dominated by a high villa, furnished in dark wood and heavy drapes; after Stalin’s death, the villa passed to the collective ownership and ...”

“... of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the mid-19th century. The case for Shakespeare ...”

“... about, but have only recently been found in a stratified context, in excavations on the Capitoline Hill. It is now for the first time possible to say with confidence that the continuous occupation of the site goes back to at least 1300 BC. Recent excavations have also revealed an Iron Age cemetery below the Capitoline (in what was later the Forum of ...”

“... that it was in part written by the up-and-coming Shakespeare. Other writers proposed include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, most recently, Thomas Watson. According to a contemporary account of his death in 1593, Marlowe himself was knifed while playing backgammon. I have sometimes wondered if this detail, not found in the coroner’s report, was an ...”

“... comes to be written, quirkier contributions will be charted: Eberhart’s gift to Geoffrey Hill; Muldoon’s ‘Immram’ as a rewrite of Slinger. Perhaps because our own Romantic tap-root is in place, Stevens’s predicament seems more analogous than formative. Moreover, the analogy is not exact. For while the post-Stevens US lyric (as approved by ...”

“... of royalty. Cairo, 19 January. Early at Cairo Airport, we wander round the departure lounge where Christopher S. discovers a museum. It’s just one room, looking out onto the tarmac, and has a score or so of showcases of various periods – Ancient Egypt, the Copts, the Mamelukes – with only a few exhibits in each: a wooden tablet of a saint in ...”

“... is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’ Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’The key word here is ‘giggling’ (or in some versions of the ...”

“... trick also licensed comparatively plain language, arhythmia and absence of rhyme in the manner of Christopher Reid’s pseudo-translations from a supposedly Eastern European language, Katerina Brac (1985). A further twist is introduced in God’s Gift to Women by ‘Candlebird’ (‘after’ the eighth-century Arabic poet Abbas Ibn al-Ahnaf), where a lover ...”

“... among them are posters of Rashid Ladoja, the sitting governor of Oyo State, and of his deputy, Christopher Alao-Akala, who is also running for governor. A little over a year ago Ladoja was impeached on trumped-up charges by a handful of members of the state assembly backed by a gang of armed militia; Akala assumed his place while Ladoja’s appeal wound ...”

“... escape back up the brae to the new houses Shepherd disliked. ‘The houses stretch up and up the hill as far as my childhood’s playground, the Quarry Wood,’ she complained to her friend Edith Robertson. ‘But at least they can’t build up my view in front … so I still rejoice in space and distance and the sky.’ Not long after this visit, Shepherd ...”

“... to come up as we started walking towards the Iraqi lines . . . When we got to the top of a hill, we started running down the other side towards the enemy position. I wasn’t afraid any more. We shouted ‘Allah-u-Akbar’ as we ran, and I could see the soldiers in front of us – a line of helmets – then they started firing. People dropped all ...”

“... of the commercial classes (‘For I trust if an enemy’s fleet came yonder round by the hill ... That the smooth-faced snubnosed rogue would leap from his counter and till’) was not disdainful enough: ‘He is wrong in thinking that war will transform the cheating tradesman into a great-souled hero, or that it will sweep away the dishonesties and ...”