“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”

“... of Clarissa’s plotting, and from his mixed responses (aloof, defensive, pained) to Aaron Hill, Colley Cibber and other early readers of the novel in manuscript, it’s evident he didn’t always take well to criticism or suggestions for alterations. There must have been something about Bradshaigh that drew him in and kept him writing, long after her ...”

“... reaching back beyond the usual records of animosity and atrocity. Like Kipling in Puck of Pook’s Hill, bringing home to modern children the origins of the English race in alliance and friendship between the Saxon Hugh and the Norman invader Sir Richard, O’Grady, whose political opinions are mostly unlike Kipling’s, brings home to his infantile though ...”

“... exploit the fears of all sections of society who suffer from Conservative attempts to demolish it. Peter Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore Rutland and the Soke of ...”

“... first all-night superclub. One of its founders, James Palumbo (the son of Conservative peer Peter Palumbo), occasionally lent his chauffeur-driven car to Peter Mandelson. He even pitched, unsuccessfully, that Ministry be adopted as the corporate sponsor of the Millennium Dome’s Faith Zone, on the grounds that ...”

“... most straightforward method is that of the History of 12th-Century Western Philosophy, edited by Peter Dronke. We just haven’t read all the material, insists Dronke. Enormous amounts of evidence lie hidden in manuscripts, or in bad early editions. The whole network of intellectual relations in the Middle Ages still needs to be charted, strand by ...”

“... before one day Bardens looked out of his fifth-floor office window in Alexandra Palace, on its hill above the North London suburbs, and saw the capital winking and humming to the south. ‘I suddenly thought, “Bugger it,”’ he remembers here, ‘“Panorama, that’s the title.”’ The first edition was a disaster. To make the programme as ...”

“... wildly from the thunder-cloud … and rush, in far-spread disorder, over the spacious face of the hill’.Some of those spectators – perhaps most of them – hadn’t come to see history made but to pick its pocket. O’Keeffe is at his best when he discusses the ancient and apparently ineradicable urge to plunder the dead. Achilles did it; the Bayeux ...”

“... to the parklands once tended by the bucolic poet Chris Torrance), then transplanted to Notting Hill (crucible of all the counter-culture follies he was later to deride). An instinctive autodidact, Home was soon weeviling through bookstall fodder, from skins and sorts and bikers to the half-forgotten magi of the Gothic, to Black Mask, Up Against the Wall ...”

“... and they certainly strove. Bob cleaned windows during the day and shifted scenery at the Streatham Hill Theatre by night. Eth combined day shifts in a local bakery with evenings as a cinema usherette, and spent Saturday mornings helping out at the headquarters of Freeman’s, the shopping catalogue company. Young Ken had a paper round, but one winter ...”

“... street – and she wanted her picture taken. Two Chinooks were overhead as I made my way to see Peter Crowley, the Unicef representative in Afghanistan. They passed over the compound and disappeared into Camp Phoenix, the American base not far from the airport. The red-haired Crowley is a descendant of James Joyce with the multiple-passport-wielding aura of ...”

“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... it reminds him of a horse.’ When we got off​ the streetcar at last we had to walk up a steep hill, trying awkwardly to share the weight of the suitcase. The houses were not quite all the same though at first they looked like it. Some of the roofs came down over the walls like caps, or else the whole second storey was like a roof, covered in shingles. The ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property 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 ...”

“... into the chalk hills. I vividly recall riding, again with Penelope Betjeman, up to the White Horse Hill on the Berkshire Downs near Uffington at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve; we dismounted, and stood on the eye, and each made a wish. Perhaps, in an older, crueller century, we would have slaughtered our horses instead of riding them home through the sleeping ...”