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“... accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having been to look at a very grand house for his magazine (World of Interiors), the expensive decoration of which included several Ben Nicholsons. This reminded me that over the ...”

“... who also included Nehru.* There is a wonderful photo of Gandhi in the Thompsons’ garden at Boars Hill in 1931: a photographer in a Calcutta studio might have unfurled a backdrop labelled ‘Britain: Home Counties’ and positioned the great man in front of it. It was on this visit that Gandhi told his host he would never say ‘farewell to India’ – the ...”

“... His own schooling is an important part of his political personality. He went to Kingham Hill School, a boarding school for disadvantaged children, and often speaks of his debt to it: ‘I owe more than I can possibly say, or ever repay, to Kingham Hill and to those who supported me while I was there.’ The point ...”

“... is about a United man on the run from the militia, and I tell him about Orr’s ‘Donegore Hill’, a brilliant, almost unknown political poem which describes the ‘unco throuither squath’ery’ – the hurrying disorganised crowd – that went into battle in 1798. In the evening we drive out to a moss – a bog – near Slemish, the mountain where ...”

“... been lodged in the Lambeth Workhouse with their mother, Hannah, before she was relocated to Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum in Surrey, where her inclination to launch into compulsive hymn singing was countered by a regime of ice-cold baths. Part of the workhouse was now the Cinema Museum. My companion, Anna Sinclair, was due to introduce a double bill of Henry ...”

“... start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a ...”

“... Since then, a number of historians have tried their hand at the prosopography of the saints. Michael Goodich has attempted to draw ‘a profile of 13th-century sainthood’, André Vauchez has studied the later Middle Ages, and now two specialists in Italian history, Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, have surveyed the whole of Western Christendom from ...”

“... Marx. He thought, like many militant Imperialists, that the cowardice of British troops at Majuba Hill had revealed the physical and moral degeneracy of the urban population. ‘The disgrace in itself is unspeakable.’ His literary experiments connected with attempts to regenerate the Imperial race by purifying its language, by conserving an essentially and ...”

“... Florence Nightingale. Yet Strachey himself seems less our contemporary now than he did when Michael Holroyd’s biography appeared in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at ...”

“... Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much ...”

“... my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then inherits his fortune and lives ...”

“... because of their period role, which is to counteract the excesses of the Sixties – Sisson, Hill, Scruton. Now the Martians arrive, commended for having reacted against ‘the drabness and gloom of the Movement and ... the “difficulty” of modernism’. By so doing, according to Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, they helped to ‘extend the ...”

“... it’s no surprise that Rachel, the narrator of A Friend from England, is part-owner of a Notting Hill bookshop and a reader of Stendhal; her first novel A Start in Life (1981) took its title from Balzac and had a heroine whose life was ‘ruined by literature’. Nor is Rachel unusual in feeling a strong attraction towards people for whom comfort is more ...”

“... is looser in style and the tone is now more personal, there is a lingering coolness. Like Michael Hofmann, Greenlaw has a fondness for paired, unexpected adjectives delivered in a clipped prose-like manner: ‘This privacy is teenage,/collective’; ‘The hill has its nightlife, amiable, averted’. Rather like the ...”

“... July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when ...”