“... precinct in Bootle where they lifted James, and again by the camera of a security firm on Breeze Hill, as they dragged James past – the child clearly in some distress. Watching those boys on camera brought into my head a flurry of pictures from my own boyhood. At that age, we were brimming with nastiness. I grew up on a scheme in the last of Scotland’s ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst​ ’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the past, social nuance, music, sensation both sexual and otherwise, buildings inside and out, the inner life of sentences – this is only the beginning of a list ...”

“... and their contractors set about engulfing pastures, market gardens, swamps, hunting country and hill villages, leaving their old palaces and mansions to be turned into tenements, schools or lunatic asylums, or to be pulled down for spoil. The Duke of Chandos was the wonder of this expanding age, a blue-blooded businessman whose wealth had come mainly from ...”

“... which they want to spend on doing good. But social policy? It is probably unfair to cite Michael Hill’s Understanding Social Policy as an example of why the subject is so likely to produce a yawn. But he manages throughout to reduce subjects of considerable interest to many individuals to a flat, uninteresting, not to say bureaucratic level. His book has ...”

“... small child cowering in an alcove, playing hide and seek and who obviously thinks I am mad. On the hill south of the main buildings is the Applegarth, where there are two yew trees, unvisited by any tourists but survivors of a group of seven such trees that had long been growing here in the 12th century when a band of monks from St Mary’s at York camped out ...”

“... A fortnight later, the Coldstreamers found themselves raked by gunfire near the summit of a wooded hill. Dazed by malaria, Lieutenant Christopher Bulteel witnessed men leaping from blazing fires; stick grenades being hurled from previously invisible trenches; and sickening scenes of hand-to-hand fighting. As Bulteel and his comrades withdrew, it began raining ...”

“... imagines the moment that Creft stepped before the firing squad:       That day on the last hill, brightmidday heat glistened on your hands you were inyellow too, yellow like fire on a cornbird’s back, fire atyour mouth the colour of lightning, then in the lastmoment, bullets crisscrossed your temple and yourheart.When she thinks back on her ...”

“... until the city conforms to his reading of it. No longer able to potter out into Notting Hill to check on some detail, he is in the position that Robin Cook found himself in when, working in a vineyard in the South of France, he decided to reinvent himself as ‘Derek Raymond’. Raymond’s late London novels are pure wish fulfilment, breeze-block ...”

“... through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin ...”

“... A study of his aesthetic preferences was expanding into a biography when I last heard, while Alan Bell, whose work on Sydney Smith is drawing to a close, plans to move up the street in Combe Florey and produce ‘a biographical study’. Though a West Country recluse can hardly be the centre of a literary movement, the comparison with Virginia Woolf and ...”

“... the paper’s readers, and elicited the largest number of indignant letters, was written by John. Alan Sokal, a professor of mathematics at UCL and physics at NYU, had gone into battle against the postmodern theorists whom he accused – I’m simplifying but not greatly – of having no understanding of the concepts they borrowed from science, and no respect ...”

“... and thinking about it, I realise he must have taught the man who taught me history at school, H.H. Hill. So exhilarated have I been by the book, I find myself absurdly pleased at the connection. 17 October. Lunch in a restaurant in Chelsea with Maggie Smith and Beverley Cross. As Bev is paying the bill the proprietor murmurs that General Pinochet is ...”

“... in the Locked Diary (it is included in the Abinger edition of Forster’s Indian memoir The Hill of Devi). In the ultra-laconic entries for 1924 he records: ‘Aug 19. Had B.S. at 46 Gordon Square. Aug 25. Had R.P. at Ham Spray’ (R.P. is Ralph Partridge, then married to Dora Carrington). What were these ‘havings’, one wonders? It’s a rakish term ...”

“... to imply an unacceptable scientific tolerance. In a memoir published in 1955, a guardsman called Alan Roland echoed Winterton’s remarks of the year before when recording his disgust at the type of man he found hitting on him: ‘The police call him a homosexual – a too-pleasant term for a vile creature.’ ‘Queer’ was so much quicker and more ...”

“... I wondered why nobody had looked him up.When I got home that evening I searched online for Dunlop Hill in Ballinasloe. ‘Dunlop hill is a hill in Dunlop, East Ayrshire,’ Google told me, but it also asked: ‘Did you mean: Dunlo ...”