“... A fortnight later, the Coldstreamers found themselves raked by gunfire near the summit of a wooded hill. Dazed by malaria, Lieutenant Christopher Bulteel witnessed men leaping from blazing fires; stick grenades being hurled from previously invisible trenches; and sickening scenes of hand-to-hand fighting. As Bulteel and his ...”

“... 1923. It’s like Isherwood’s retrospective marvelling, as he sets off to America at the end of Christopher and His Kind, at the unknown future and the unknown life partner who await him: ‘He will be near you for many years without your meeting. But it would be no good if you did meet him now. At present, he is only four years old.’ Forster seems never ...”

“... doily on a small plate.Tangerines.A day in February: heart-shaped cookies on St Valentine’s.Like Christopher, a discarded saint.A tough woman with black hair.‘I got to set my wig straight.’A gold and silver day begins to wane.A crescent moon.Ice on the window.Give my love to, oh, anybody.This is characteristic of Schuyler at his best, pitched somewhere ...”

“... in 1880, and set at an angle to the main road from Hampstead into town, on the corner of Hampstead Hill Gardens, one of those circuitous side-roads designed to fit buildings into an existing road network and acting as a short-cut to nowhere. The front is Victorian Gothic, in creeper-strangled red brick, with a pointed, many-faceted, slate-tiled roof which ...”

“... he turned up as a sports master and odd-job-man at a private crammer in Hampshire called Vicar’s Hill, run by a Mrs Brewer. Then, in 1961, came what can now be seen as his big break. Not for the first or the last time in his life, an older man was seduced by his combination of energy and deference. T.H. (‘Tim’) Cobb, the headmaster of a respectable ...”

“... Stella, Noland, Louis, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Poons; his Britons, Caro, Tucker, Latham, Hill, Hockney, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Denny, Hodgkin, Ayres, Buckley, while his one European was Pol Bury. So Kasmin’s choice was focused on abstraction, with Hockney as the joker in the pack, where Fraser’s was wider, though with an emphasis on ...”

“... its secretary); to his early activities as Boyle’s paid assistant; to his lucrative work with Christopher Wren as City Surveyor rebuilding London after the Great Fire; and to his independent career as one of England’s greatest architects and civil engineers, responsible for the new Bethlem madhouse, the Royal College of Physicians, the Fish Street ...”

“... Oxford doctor Humphrey Havard, and a Dominican priest, Gervase Mathew. Tolkien inducted his son Christopher, later a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English at Oxford, and the editor of his father’s copious Nachlass. His enduring achievement was to draw the maps for The Lord of the Rings. Then there was the ever present ‘Warnie’ – Lewis’s ...”

“... Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt At what we saw. The ...”

“... and Reformation 1453-1660 by Mary Hollings, which we used in our history classes under H.H. Hill. I imagine most of us remembered this quote and trotted it out in School Certificate a year or so later, and my only thought now is how wearisome it must have been for the examiner reading it again and again. I suppose the Landsknecht’s equivalent gesture ...”

“... or bet on, likely looking champion competitors. Since 2014, an annual lawnmower race up Harbour Hill has allowed frustrated boy (and girl) racers to be petrolheads for the day.Last year’s sheep races raised £40,000 for a local charity that subsidises residents’ medical prescriptions to UK levels. There is no NHS on Sark: the island pays for a doctor to ...”

“... under great pressure.’ But what really made me sit up straight was his remark about Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Annunciations’, the last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I ...”

“... did: ‘Wordless Functional Analysis’ ‘burst upon the world’ in 1957. These are the words of Christopher Wintle, in the Memorial Symposium on Keller in Music Analysis, and Wintle shrewdly remarks that ‘it was less the matter than the wordless manner of FA that excited greatest musical interest.’ I must confess to finding myself in difficulties with ...”

“... hotchpotch of Bavarian vernacular, Cornish weatherboard, Jacobean, Regency, Strawberry Hill Gothic, Victorian Gothic’ – a list that could be much extended. Here, in Haslam, is a drawing of 1927 for Portmeirion’s comfortably demotic steeple-like ‘Bell Tower’: no nonsense about a ‘Campanile’, as it is now known. Indeed an earlier draft ...”

“... minister when in office. John McGregor (afterwards Lord McGregor) has rejoined merchant bankers Hill Samuel since his departure from the Transport Department, where he was Secretary of State. Hill Samuel has advised the Government in many privatisations, including that of British Airways. During Mr McGregor’s tenure at ...”