“... through various bureaucratic and Parliamentary sleights-of-hand, goes back to 1916, when Bindon Hill became the testing-ground of the newly created Tank Corps. Even at that date another vision, or set of visions, of the area was already in place: through the pseudo-archaeological ‘downland’ mania of H.J. Massingham, the neo-paganism of Llewellyn Powys ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... who made his money from a large paper mill. Ned was brought up in Boston’s fashionable Beacon Hill district, where his family owned an enormous house filled with furniture and art imported from Europe. His parents gave him every advantage, including an excellent education at Harvard, but little was asked of him in return. He was not pressured to enter the ...”

“... torches, hoods, racing horses, a whole cavalcade swooping through the dark and coming up over a hill. Beautifully shot, as the whole movie is, by Robert Richardson, a welcome Oscar nominee. Then the riders pause. In spite of the apparent evidence of the previous shots, they can’t see. There is something wrong with the placing of the eyeholes in their ...”

“... Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision never to write consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T.J. Binyon, in Murder Will ...”

“... his publisher, he fell ‘headlong into the gutter’, he was ‘constantly being humiliated’. Michael Bloch, who knew his subject well for many years, is a tactful, sensitive but not an indulgent biographer. His book conveys the contradictions of character and circumstance out of which this complicated, elusive but attractive personality evolved towards ...”

“... was 32 in 1920 and newly appointed political secretary to Nancy Astor. She appears on the cover of Michael Carney’s biography, first published in 1999 and recently reissued, photographed in three-quarter profile with shingled hair, spotted neckerchief and slightly parted lips: the very image of the New Woman. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister to whom ...”

“... foundation was thought to have begun from a point on the Arx (one of two peaks of the Capitoline Hill, along with the Capitolium) and to have looked off south-southeast – the usual augural orientation – down the Via Sacra. When the Roman citizenry was divided into 35 tribes – to organise, among other things, voting in one of the popular assemblies ...”

“... now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete 12-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters and Slater’s own editions of Dickens’s journalism. But Slater is a career Dickensian, not a popular ...”

“... postwar history to isolate a series of decisive incidents, both familiar and sombre: the Notting Hill Riots of 1958; Tory candidate Peter Griffiths winning Smethwick six years later with the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’; Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968; the New Cross fire of 1981 which killed 13 young black ...”

“... Queen’s House, the ‘castle’ that Vanbrugh built for himself, the Georgian crescent of Michael Searles’s Paragon – and while Dulwich is less monumental, it does have John Soane’s Picture Gallery and the buildings of Dulwich College, ranging from mannered Georgian to Barry’s lurid neo-Gothic, with the remnants of the Crystal Palace nearby ...”

“... There’s​ a morbid aspect to Libertyville, the Chicago suburb where Pan, Michael Clune’s first novel, is set: ‘At night in the Midwest in winter,’ we are told, ‘the raw death of the endless future … is sometimes bare inches above the roofs.’ It’s the kind of thought that could only occur to a sullen teenager with a flair for melodrama ...”

“... observable in some of John Banville’s descriptions. ‘The baron’s house stood on Hradcany hill hard by the imperial palace, looking down over Kleinseit to the river’: another shard of research. ‘From an upstairs window a servant girl flung out an exclamation of dirty water’: mere local colour. The two main ingredients of the mixed narrative ...”

“... could be carried forward by a whole range of later historians, by Veronica Wedgwood, Christopher Hill and the rest. Carlyle hated democracy, both the word and the idea, which is no doubt one source of his appeal at Peterhouse. But Cromwell’s army was much more truly representative of the English people than was Parliament, and Carlyle it was who originally ...”

“... acquired a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both ...”