“... spent his last years in constant travel and increasing pain. He moved between his house, Gad’s Hill, and his offices in London, between London and unidentified villages in France where Ternan lived with her mother, between home and lengthy, exhausting reading tours throughout the United Kingdom and the United States. His heart was failing, his swollen left ...”

“... in Dallas ran a conference in November. Nor is More much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 ...”

“... Kircher, as well as Constantine and St Eustachius. Pilgrims and walkers still climb the hill to see the church, enjoy its splendid views and buy mugs with Kircher’s picture on them. Yet Kircher went wrong on almost every point of fact, and some of his mistakes may not have been innocent. The marble tablet that first informed him he had made a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”