“... 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 ...”

“... opens the treasure chest and finds it empty. We spent the gold on that building at the top of the hill, you say, handing them a telescope. So long as the accountant doesn’t walk up there and discover the house is just a wooden façade, everything is just fine.Wirecard’s answer to the question ‘Where’s the money?’ was a version of ‘You don’t know ...”

“... in the distant city of Argos, The Eumenides is set where the play was performed: in Athens, on the hill of the Areopagus, a stone’s throw from the Theatre of Dionysos. The dominant characters are not humans but gods. Orestes has come to Athens for sanctuary, to beg Athena for absolution from matricide. Athena, like Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, is the ...”

“... mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the street, and the woman made an offer well above the market rate. ‘Frederick had just ...”

“... wading through a pool of water in a blue dress. Another was of Hania, aged two, rolling down a hill of daisies by Ladbroke Grove.In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road ...”

“... cliché: ‘his face now a tear-stained mask.’ But the books, what do they reveal? According to Christopher Ricks, the notes to Eugene Onegin have a tone of ‘patiently patrician calm’ whose ‘coolness can easily become the condescending heartlessness which so attenuates Nabokov’s fiction’. D.J. Enright found Nabokov ‘rich in what is given to few ...”

“... greatest comedy and one of the greatest comedies in English’. More recently, Howard Erskine-Hill, pursuing a political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the play. There is an appealing American ...”

“... for the reason such an alien artefact, along with Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty and Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, could speak to him, namely that the sudden scope given to the truth-telling urge in ‘the Eastern homosphere’ – whatever that is – has lent energy and accuracy to these artists’ nonsexual observations as well, as ...”

“... his face washed back to its usual pink pain, about seeing that crowd of anonymous thousands on a hill with their lighters all flickering. ‘It wasn’t a human feeling.’‘What are you doing?’ her husband asked softly, tentatively, repeating his question until she shifted her blank gaze up to him. What was she doing? Couldn’t he see her arms full of ...”

“... of Kelley’s release, and none of them mentions anything about an escape or injury. In July 1593, Christopher Parkins reports from Prague that Kelley has been promised ‘his enlargement presently’, but still ‘remains in hold’ at Krivoklat. According to Dee’s diary he was released on 4 October, but the best source puts the date a couple of days ...”

“... and ‘the double-dapple’ of Wales its catalyst: an irregular and enclosed landscape, whose hill and river rhythms, like the sea-light of Caldey Island off the Pembrokeshire coast, freed him from the hieratic rigidities of Gill’s aesthetic, its trapped elegance – what Jones later called its ‘toyishness’ – and rigid closure to contingency. One ...”

“... in 1974, crammed with photographs, illustrations and comic strips, compiled and annotated by Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested ...”

“... and division exactly where, in the case of the Middle East, there is none of either. Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Steven Solarz, to mention two Contra opponents, are supporters of everything Israel does, and when the connection between the Contras and the Israelis was made public there was a noticeable avoidance of blame for Israel. The ...”