“... 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 ...”

“... led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether. Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his ...”

“... of the circumstances in which one met him – (in my case) generally walking on Primrose Hill – he always had a book on the go and was the only person I know who could read as he walked, though Pepys used to do it, reading all the way from his office to Greenwich. And maybe today it’s less unusual in that people can walk nowadays while glued to ...”

“... acknowledge this. ‘The end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely,’ as Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper put it in their two-volume history of Britain’s colonial wars in India and South-East Asia from the 1940s to 1963, which forms the perfect complement to Hyam’s work.* It was clearly not as pretty as that ‘great ship goes ...”