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“... opening section, ‘“Two Acres”’, is set in 1913. Two Acres is a pleasant house in Stanmore Hill inhabited by Freda Sawle, a youngish widow, and her children Hubert, George and Daphne. Writing in the third person, with each chapter tied to one character’s point of view, Hollinghurst stages a weekend visit from Cecil, who’s at Cambridge with George ...”

“... landings at Salerno in 1943 (receiving the Military Cross for his role in the capture of a small hill under close-range German machine-gun and grenade fire), brings readers as close as they will ever get to the experience of the combatants. Wawro provides a forensic analysis of command failure under conditions of high stress and information dearth. Showalter ...”

“... to have. But it doesn’t distress her, so it doesn’t distress me. We have our sandwiches on a hill outside Weston with a vast view over Somerset. She wants to say, ‘What a grand view,’ but her words are going too. ‘Oh,’ she exclaims. ‘What a big lot of About.’ There are sheep in the field. ‘I know what they are,’ she says, ‘but I don’t ...”

“... that invariably comes with our confident discovery in the past of patterns and developments. Christopher Duffy even provides a map of the likely troop movements to the north of London, making graphically real the imaginary confrontation with which I began. He counts out all the groups of soldiers that would have been involved and tries to estimate the ...”

“... with Robert Dole, who was until recently Clinton’s complicit partner in the management of the Hill. Only the other week, speaking in Delaware, Dole repeated his call: ‘One reason to elect me in November’96 is to keep the promises President Clinton made to you in 1992.’ The gap between New Democrat and Moderate Republican could not be narrower, and ...”

“... Not long after, the discussion group was disbanded. The gatecrasher’s name, we learnt, was Christopher Hitchens, and he apparently did this sort of thing rather often, being famous for a sort of pyrotechnic brashness. Looking back, one realises that these were entirely apposite qualities for the successful journalist, which is very much what Hitchens ...”

“... made of the Quatuor – a fact which oddly passes without comment in the useful discography by Christopher Dingle that concludes Hill’s book. The Germans were not unsympathetic to these musical endeavours. The camp commander supplied Messiaen with manuscript paper, and found a cello, with one string missing, for ...”

“... A marriage​ that makes a good end to a comedy will often make as good a beginning to a tragedy. If any couple bore out that maxim it was Annabella Milbanke and George Gordon Byron. The ‘happy’ chapter lasted barely 24 hours, the ‘ever after’ is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s appreciation ...”

“... police and the press looks shoddy and in some points disturbingly reminiscent of the case against Christopher Jefferies, the schoolteacher wrongly arrested for the murder of Joanna Yeates and branded on front pages ‘strange’ and a ‘peeping Tom’ because he had odd hair and lived alone. Lucan had an earldom, a flashy moustache and a vile ...”

“... his set: This coterie has led the spirit of anti-Europeanism that pervades Tory Party and country. Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and the rest posit a brave little England of crusty country-living upper-class eccentrics versus the dread (another of their words) bureaucracy of Brussels … Don’t imagine that the breed is dying out. Boris Johnson, editor ...”

“... of, such as the new Kensington Central Library. Sometimes they dressed up as Victorians, or as Christopher Wren in a bath chair, and carried a cardboard coffin symbolising the moribund state of affairs. Boty, in costume as a Dresden shepherdess, naturally caught the public eye. Interviewed by the Daily Express in 1959 she pronounced the Air Ministry ...”

“... of doubt that was lost in his transcription. Now, in a new critical edition by Ian Forrest and Christopher Whittick, the visitation book is available in full translation for the first time.* As they write: ‘It is not an objective record of what was happening in medieval parishes, being in fact much more fascinating than that.’ In 1397 the visitors ...”

“... him the honour’ of preaching against him. He set up house in the Casa Saluzzo ‘at Albaro on a hill overlooking Genoa, cold – frosty but airy, – only one chimney in the whole house, which is spacious enough for twenty’. His mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, with her father and brother, occupied separate apartments in the same house. About a mile down the ...”

“... grape vine. You can see the planting she’s done here in London in front of houses in any hill town in Tuscany. Cheek by jowl, each in a piece of land not more than twenty feet by forty, are wilderness, cultivated informality and disciplined horticulture. All make pictures, two by intention, one through neglect.The desire to make landscape pictures is ...”

“... in the face of danger. In her old age, proud unrepining Lotte Schloss comes to the high-minded hill-setting of The Retreat, founded by a cracked visionary whose mission it has been to persuade Jews of the wisdom of assiduous assimilation. Efforts are made. But if, up at The Retreat, many of the Jews themselves, however alienated from the faith of their ...”