“... who stood for individual freedom – ‘We must not allow ourselves to become ants in an ant-hill’ – and had ‘an inherent sense of human equality’. For Brown and others who preserve a sense of socialist mission, it is hard to incorporate the heritage of protest into the public profile of Kinnock’s Labour Party. In Glasgow, exceptionally, people ...”

“... By 23 August, he had rejoined his battalion, which was now in the Ypres Salient near Kemmel Hill. Ford’s ‘Corbiephobia’, as he called it, was at least an acknowledgment, in its identification of the soldier’s helplessness with the child’s, that the ‘strafings’ to which a person is subjected in warfare are generic and ...”

“... exceptionalism came first, originating in the Puritans’ attempt to build a ‘city upon a hill’ that would impress the England they had left behind. At least in theory, Anderson suggests, American exceptionalism could be modest. Here he is on firm ground. One of the most forceful denunciations of American expansionism was made eight years before the ...”

“... incognito when it suited him, gave licence to his courtiers. When Rochester set up shop on Tower Hill in the guise of an imaginary quack doctor, Dr Alexander Bendo, or when he ‘vanished … among the citizens of London’ dressed as a puritanical merchant (two of his wilder escapades), he was taking the prevailing culture of disguise to its camped-up ...”

“... in this edition, omitting ‘mere slips of the pen’; and he is not above telling us that Bredon Hill is ‘961 ft high and commands extensive views’, whether or not it improves our view of the poem, because Housman himself had a head for heights. ‘AEH,’ he notes, ‘paid particular attention to the height of the spire of St Mary’s (220 ...”

“... never gets into a film except as part of the plot.In the evening, read at St Mark’s, Primrose Hill in aid of the appeal against the demolition of the chapel of the old Boys’ Home in Regent’s Park Road and the construction of some frightful block of flats. Church packed, people standing at the back, and though the audience is a bit sticky to start with ...”

“... and thinking about it, I realise he must have taught the man who taught me history at school, H.H. Hill. So exhilarated have I been by the book, I find myself absurdly pleased at the connection. 17 October. Lunch in a restaurant in Chelsea with Maggie Smith and Beverley Cross. As Bev is paying the bill the proprietor murmurs that General Pinochet is ...”

“... sight of it. It doesn’t quite match R.’s experience when a heron mobbed by crows near Primrose Hill missed him by inches, but as with any evidence of urban rurality, I find it cheering. It confirms, too, my detestation of gulls, which I would happily see hounded out of cities and back to their proper stamping ground. 28 July. I’m just finishing the ...”

“... a special law to prevent Thistlewood and his friends from doing their absurd drilling on Primrose Hill? The conventional view used to be that of Elie Halévy, that the Acts represented a panic-stricken doubling down on counter-revolution. Recently, historians have tended to regard them as rather mild measures, only sporadically enforced and in any case ...”

“... produced in a single instant of scholarly insight. Chapman’s version is quite different. Like Christopher Logue’s violent adaptations of the Iliad, it testifies to a lifetime’s battle with thoughts and afterthoughts, a continual argument between the translator’s own preoccupations and his sense of what is distinctive to Homer. Chapman’s project ...”

“... though, publishers have seemed willing to take on and even promote this landlocked genre. Notting Hill Editions, which publishes essays exclusively, has established a prize of £20,000 for an unpublished submission of up to 8000 words. Fitzcarraldo awards a prize of £3000 to a book-length essay (minimum 25,000 words) not yet taken on by a publisher. There is ...”

“... was a roar from the road below and the squeak of tank tracks. A column of Warriors clanked up the hill. The Warrior is a strong fighting vehicle. It can protect a team of soldiers as it carries them into battle. Bullets bounce off it. A single inch-thick shell from its cannon can do terrible damage to anything unarmoured it hits. But these Warriors looked ...”

“... about the American slaves and the Confederacy; also of a giant, name of Gazonka, who lives on a hill outside Glossop. Grandad has ancestors; unlike Irish people, who don’t know our correct birthdays even. One of his ancestors suppressed a riot by laying low a man called Murphy, a thug at the head of a mob who was wielding a wire whip. For this feat, his ...”

“... But the next general election is not going to be like Crosby, though it may well be quite like Hill-head. The Liberals will, come what may, constitute the bulk of an Alliance Parliamentary group under any likely outcome. The negotiations have protected their interests in all the ‘golden seats’ where they are poised for victory. It can hardly be claimed ...”

“... a wild eccentric in his social manner, as well as in his disorderly mandarin-style beard (Geoffrey Hill was apparently reminded of Empson when he saw a prize-winning Yorkshire terrier). At Richards’s funeral he read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The organiser of the event, Richard Luckett, described him as speaking ‘inaudibly and inexactly against his ...”