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“... cannot say, for it is a long time since anyone tried. The most influential recent study of him, by Christopher Hill, is more a series of essays than a biography. Morrill’s volume is not a biography either, but it is as accomplished a substitute for one as a collaborative venture could expect to provide. In invoking Elton’s pronouncement on ...”

“... of expulsion from Gollan. On top of this came a minority report from three members – one was Christopher Hill – of the commission of enquiry into democracy within the Party: they concluded that there was no democracy at all. An agreement to hold an extraordinary congress served to postpone final decisions. It took place on Good Friday 1957. Arnold ...”

“... of J.H. Plumb, the cosmopolitan allusiveness of E.J. Hobsbawm, and the impassioned radicalism of Christopher Hill. Some have criticised his work for being too bland, for lacking analytical bite, for being more concerned with experience than with explanation, for relying too much on frequently-recycled quotations, and for the way in which one book is so ...”

“... wake of the great debate of the 1940s and 1950s that was dominated by R.H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Christopher Hill and Trevor-Roper himself. Its focus was the economic causes of the war. The conflicting hypotheses about the wealth and power of the aristocracy and gentry, about the waning of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and about the ...”

“... his ANGEL bidith and Ma weep when To morow. * Scock Land it raned i dont rember pa preching on a hill with a gift of Tonges a namile cup for monie the Throw a cabige * the house fers the paler with the moggne Chairs moslie Shut ixep Sun day vosens: you Smell the Old brikes Thur the florry paper done 3 steps to the kichin black rage Tin pots on hooks the ...”

“... Christopher Middleton​ hated New York. Among the things he particularly disliked, I suspect, is New York’s position as a cultural bazaar, where reputations are bought, sold and traded, with the attendant buzz of speculation. He was incapable of schmoozing, and his career suffered accordingly. New York’s greatest draw, people action and brute energy, would have been lost on him ...”

“... In his first book, Milton’s Grand Style, Christopher Ricks showed us that Milton wanted his readers to be attentive to the fact that when our ‘first parents’ fell, their language fell with them. Paradise Lost could only have been written in the language we were left with after the catastrophe, but is partly about the language we started with, and what happened to it ...”

“... an urban audience’. In 1994, aged twenty, Rebanks too had a tiff with his father – a Cumbrian hill farmer – and went off to Australia. The farm where he spent nights making hay under tractor light confused him with its vastness. ‘Tens of thousands of sheep ranched in fields bigger than our entire farm. Herds of six or seven hundred cows.’ An ...”

“... and conduct in those biographies of Cromwell which have a soft spot for God’s Englishman. Christopher Hill skips lightly over it. John Buchan refers to it as ‘a farmyard jape’ and excuses it on the grounds that ‘this thing touched the heart of his authority and he could permit no weakening.’ Others suggest that the story is probably ...”

“... The radical English Protestant sects – Diggers, Ranters, Seekers and the like – applauded by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down (1972) challenged ecclesiastical hierarchies by maintaining that all matter was endued with spirit, that God was present in the fabric of nature, even that God and nature were one. No need for an external ...”

“... board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill – had planted radical politics in the soil of English history, the new cohort had more cosmopolitan ambitions. They looked abroad, especially to the Continent and the likes of Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser, for remedies against what they ...”

“... Alecture​ by the critic Christopher Ricks, now in his late eighties, is a properly theatrical affair. There is much leaning forward on the lectern, legs often crossed; hand frequently raised with intensity to brow (often furrowed, especially when quoting statements of folly); sheets of paper flipped away as though unnecessary to the performance (if you catch a glimpse of them they seem to contain little more than a word or a quotation), such paper flurries occurring particularly at times when in the sober medium of prose one might notice a hiccup or a rough conjunction in argument; meanwhile a building sweat, spreading from the armpits but also on the ample brow, conveys that this is stuff that gets the pulse racing ...”

“... things were not going well at home. Glenconner by now had five children: Charles, Henry, Christopher and the twins May and Amy. Their father found it difficult to be ‘affectionate or tactile’ with them and Glenconner, still following the pattern set in her own family, felt it was more ‘urgent’ to be a wife than a mother. She sent the children ...”

“... in heaps to lie. Behold I have destroyed a thousand men With this same worthless ass’s jaw. As Christopher Hill has pointed out, The Pilgrim’s Progress was written in jail at almost exactly the same time as Milton, imprisoned by blindness, was composing Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Bunyan was, ...”

“... of abuse for the white rural poor, hicks and hayseeds connote ignorance but also innocence. The Hill-billie of Mathews’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1900) is a cheerful enough character ‘who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes ...”