“... 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have alcohol, prostitution, the theatre, cheap accommodation, Fascism, golf, motor vehicles, moustaches, and the use of out-of-date slang.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I will not name him. Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they got off a train from Birmingham New Street which connected with the ferry to Belfast. A sixth man, Hughie Callaghan, was arrested the next day ...”

“... The voiceover narrative, written by Geoffrey Ward, is remorseless and untheatrical, just as Peter Coyote’s spoken narration is dry, unaccented and a little formal, as if reading out a casualty report. But Burns and Novick seem to understand how specious it would be to make this a tidy, organised report – a history – instead of attempting to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... club to Styles, and then back to the club. Agatha’s only friend was her wire-haired terrier, Peter. In December she cracked. Packing a suitcase with an odd assortment of effects, and putting on a money belt containing several hundred pounds, she drove south. At Newlands Corner she seems to have had a slight accident. Leaving her car, she walked to ...”

“... before the land caves in on the lowest worked-out seam. This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s the place I may well rest if there’s a spot under the rose roots and the daffodils by which dad dignified the family plot. If buried ashes saw then I’d survey the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek, and left, the ground where Leeds United play ...”

“... Jesi, in the Marches (fortunately, the count had hidden both his family and the manuscript in a hill village nearby). There seems to be every reason to agree with Arnaldo Momigliano, whom Krebs cites: the Germania deserves a high place among ‘the one hundred most dangerous books ever written’. Like a virus, Krebs argues, it could multiply and spread, in ...”

“... their siege on the last Palestinian enclave in the east, a refugee camp on Tel el-Zaatar, Hill of Thyme, perched on the highway leading to Christian mountain villages above Beirut. The Christian militia spokesmen whom I came to know justified their assault on Tel el-Zaatar by claiming that its armed residents frequently stopped traffic to extort money ...”

“... at UCLA with several of the anthropologists on whose work he draws, including Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst; the university was also home to such scholars as Marija Gimbutas and Carlo Ginzburg, who had found shamanic traces in the archaeology and folklore of prehistoric and medieval Europe.This new turn displaced armchair ethnography with ...”

“... beautiful cover illustration for The Wise Wound, the study of menstruation by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove (translated into German in 1980), shows the Grail chalice within a womb. In Syberberg’s film Amfortas’s wound is both internal and external, as in dream-logic: his tunic is bloodied at groin-level, but the wound is also carried about on a ...”

“... his bleeding face, and if we are as severe as these editors, and if we want to keep that moment (Peter Brook, for example, didn’t), we have really to accept a version of the play that lacks over a hundred lines found only in the Folio. The General Introduction ably defends these editorial principles, and along the way gives a very lucid and engaging ...”

“... a youth who carried in his bosom the Psalms of David’. And he it was who charged up the hill next morning ‘like a wild boar’, in the words of Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi, to destroy the Viking jarls. Edward Freeman said flatly that Alfred was ‘the most perfect character in history’, more practical than Saint Louis, holier than George ...”

“... every appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without ...”