“... Leopold Bloom might muse. We hear the biff biff of two helicopters above the council estate on the hill. Then he describes a recent shoot-out: helicopters and SAS men waiting at the bridge, shooting, a wounded IRA man hiding in the roofspace of a row of council houses and moving from one to the other as the houses are searched again and again. The estate is ...”

“... however. Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General, was obliged to resign when it was revealed that Peter Mandelson had borrowed around £400,000 from him to buy a house in Notting Hill. Robinson stayed out in the cold while Mandelson, the man who borrowed the money, was reinstated a year later. Robinson’s special ...”

“... of the godly cause – Sir Walter Mildmay, founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the MP Peter Wentworth, who agitated for further reform of the English church and its liturgy – may deserve further attention. He once declared that ‘I would have all reformations done by public authority. It were very dangerous that every private man’s zeal ...”

“... is the flesh Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move Along the side-fall of the hill – Maguire and his men . . . This is brilliantly mimetic: the initial heavy stress of ‘clay’ drops to the short stresses of ‘is’ and ‘the’, bringing on the stooping of the potato-gatherers of the next line. The rhythm (one and a two and one ...”

“... What did a ride on a rhinoceros cost in 1684? At the Belle Sauvage Inn, at the bottom of Ludgate Hill, one shilling would have bought you a glimpse of the rhino, while for two shillings you could sit on its back. Grigson has included a second index specifically for animals, with entries under, say, ‘Elephant’, such as ‘African, Henry ...”

“... of those who witnessed the pre-internet, pre-phone-camera world:It reminded me of standing on a hill, in the dark, with a big industrial plant in the distance and just feeling this roar: this massive earthly vibration, like the silence had been taken over by something that was even deeper than silence itself, something that silence implied, in a way, like ...”

“... which ‘conjures up the now familiar and haunting spectre of urban alienation’. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar is a ‘particularly depressing place to live in’, with an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’, mainly an ‘example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical position at ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... were staged with unprecedented intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic minorities. In ...”

“... the translator credited. Only the acknowledgment that the book was originally published in 1961 by Peter Owen allowed me to discover that the translator was A.E. Murch. The material reinstated by Einaudi in 1990 is not included; Taylor seems unaware of this. The new edition has few notes, no chronology and no index. This, together with frequent and sometimes ...”

“... order his dishevelled social and sexual lives for good. The year before they married, the diaries peter out. Stanley Weintraub, who has edited all 12 diaries and the fragments from 1880 and 1917 into two stout volumes, gives the game away in his lively account of their provenance. When Shaw married Charlotte, he left his papers at his mother’s house in ...”

“... involvement in a porno racket, and sometimes with a more serious resonance as in Geoffrey Hill’s poems on Offa. Mr Leyser matches Hill in the intensity of his meditation on the meaning of the past, a past whose remoteness Dr McKitterick’s conventional approach confirms. The paradoxical nature of Early Medieval ...”

“... older than his 38 years – he refers to his ‘time of life’ as if he were nearly over the hill. His account of Molly Bloom gives her several more lovers than the book by my reading, indicates, unless he means her admirers. Sometimes his commentary sounds like the report of a Marriage Guidance Counsellor – ‘He and Molly must face their problems of ...”

“... should have been digested or they shouldn’t have been broached. The TLS furore or fury about Peter Reading’s poem ‘Cub’ – anti-semitic, or dramatising anti-semitism? – isn’t appropriately or commensurately to be engaged with in two pages of musings (under the aegis ‘Or Only Funny and Sad?’), ending with: ‘Tone is a fearfully difficult ...”

“... after one party, they spent an hour in a heap on the hall floor – ‘Says a lot for the drinks Peter pours.’ On quiet evenings they enjoyed the Benny Hill Show. By the end of their lives Lord and Lady Snow had become a half-comical duo, not at home in a new world (‘the left was going all wrong on the cultural ...”