“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was ...”

“... lonely women are brought to ruin by a manipulative man. By then, towns like Hassocks and Burgess Hill have taken on an almost occult significance, as have alcohol, prostitution, the theatre, cheap accommodation, Fascism, golf, motor vehicles, moustaches, and the use of out-of-date slang. Most readers’ first entry into this claustrophobic world is by way of ...”

“... smoking and brooding. Obediently, they strut their stuff through the agitated chasms of Notting Hill. Rag clouds, with scurfy grey beer-guts, block the window, mess it up: the room is fetched into the local sky, and the writer’s profile smeared against the glass. He becomes part of the sky. He contributes to the weather. His fresh complexion is coarsened ...”

“... complained that a ‘malevolent tree’ had appeared on the site of Nero’s tomb on the Pincian Hill, providing a gathering point for the evil spirits fostered by his corpse, who assumed the form of crows. It took a solemn procession, an exorcism and the intervention of the Madonna before the area was made safe and the church of Santa Maria del Popolo could ...”