“... fired a pistol at Queen Victoria’s carriage as she was taking her evening drive to Constitution Hill, Oxford could only muster: ‘Oh, I might as well shoot at her as anybody else.’ At the Old Bailey, after the leading medical experts of the day had duelled over moral insanity, delusions, phrenology and lesions of the will, Chief Justice Denman wearily ...”

“... the square, indeed she scarcely seems to have known where it was: ‘One side is chimneys on a hill, I suppose Islington.’ Three months after she moved in she reported ‘a chamber pot in the sitting room and a bed in the dining room’. Her spell there was brief – from August 1939 to October 1940 – and fractured by war. ‘Everybody is feeling the ...”

“... the grave on how the work should be published. In a forthcoming essay on Walpole as an historian, Peter Sabor comments on the way that ‘the preposterously Gothic arrangements by which Walpole preserved his history unread until generations after his death played into the hands of expurgators, conflators, and hostile commentators.’ Yet the passages now ...”

“... opening section, ‘“Two Acres”’, is set in 1913. Two Acres is a pleasant house in Stanmore Hill inhabited by Freda Sawle, a youngish widow, and her children Hubert, George and Daphne. Writing in the third person, with each chapter tied to one character’s point of view, Hollinghurst stages a weekend visit from Cecil, who’s at Cambridge with George ...”

“... Bends were closed to vehicular traffic in the 1990s, bypassed by a new, straighter road on the hill above. What is left of Telford’s road is still open to pedestrians and, apart from its cracked and weedy tarmac surface, it remains much as he created it. ‘His greatest work,’ Glover writes, ‘the Holyhead Road, the Menai Bridge, his canals and the ...”

“... Interval discussion of the work’s ‘deflected’ sexuality is interrupted by the appearance of Peter Pears, who arrives as a living witness from a kind of heroic era for homosexual artists. The Swimming-Pool Library is a rich and clever and funny novel. The richness is in large part a matter of the density of detail the book manages to accumulate, detail ...”

“... aliens. (Nor is this particular combination confined to Los Angeles, as is illustrated by Peter Brimelow’s borrowing of the title of the 1988 science fiction film, Alien Nation, for the anti-immigrant tract he published seven years later.) Congresswoman Seastrand invokes Sodom and Gomorrah because ‘we probably have the most adulterers living here ...”

“... which was in fact a large corrugated iron shed, built first in the grounds of Mill Hill School, where he taught, and then in his garden at 78 Banbury Road. He began working on the dictionary in 1879; the first volume of the first edition was published in 1884. But the project had been up and running since 1857, when the Philological Society ...”

“... The 1630s saw the ‘great migration’ led by the Rome-hating John Winthrop, whose ‘city on the hill’ sermon has echoed through many inaugural presidential speeches. The God who blessed change in England and English colonisation in America was indisputably a Protestant God. By this prescription, strands of myth, memory and history were twisted together ...”

“... Haw-Haw’s powers reached their apotheosis. ‘Tonight our bombers will be coming over Stamford Hill,’ one listener remembered him announcing, ‘so you have that pleasure to look forward to.’ In Bradford, it went around that he had referred to the new roof being built on the grammar school, and commented: ‘You needn’t trouble to finish it as ...”

“... a man’s riding clothes. She commissioned portraits of herself. But instead of patronising Sir Peter Lely, the artist favoured by Charles’s mistresses, Catherine patronised the Flemish (and Catholic) baroque painter Jacob Huysmans. In 1664, Huysmans portrayed her as her namesake, St Catherine of Alexandria. It is a work of serious, and ...”

“... where the land lay full under the sun and the sky, the house at Willowglen, set against a western hill and facing an eastern hill, with the north boundary of hawthorn hedge, may trees, willow trees, had only brief sun in the morning, making the house cool even in summer, but if you looked from the cool and often cold world ...”

“... civic leader and a little girl named Shirley Jean Bersie who lived in the artist’s Potrero Hill neighbourhood and liked to visit him and watch him draw. Most of Rizzoli’s drawings include captions and other pieces of text, invariably rendered in beautiful hand-drawn lettering reminiscent of early 20th-century municipal signage and Fancy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... useful objects respected like artworks. Blades, chisels, axes, boots, helmets, guns. The actor Peter Coyote remembers Joanne Kyger laughing about ‘how much stuff Gary had to store so that he could go off to Japan and live simply’. The novice monk insisted that his future wife clear her credit-card debt, which had climbed to $1000, before she travelled ...”