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“... of Limit is called ‘The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible Structure: A Debate’ (Agenda, Autumn-Winter 1971/2). Here Hill says of Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’: ‘One is moved by ... the tune of a mind distrustful yet envious, mistrusting the abstraction, mistrusting its own mistrust, drawn half against its will into the chanting refrain that is both paean ...”

“... the city, has ‘one of the vilest climates under heaven ... The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright necrological purgatory in spring.’ Five generations of Stevensons before Louis had braved the Scottish elements, designing lighthouses that defied the worst the country’s storms could throw at ...”

“... He was by now wealthy, and spent from early morning to late at night at the office and his winter weekends refereeing rugby. His wife, still lacking a secure constituency, decided to read for the Bar. ‘Do what you like, love’ was Denis’s response, as it would be to all her future plans: it would indeed be the response of all God’s Englishmen ...”

“... to those critics of poetry who simply follow current fashions. He possesses in a high degree what Robert Lowell called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his work often echoes those early Irish nature poems he admires – poetry which, as he points out, belonged to a tradition which did not undergo Romance influences and which ‘registers certain sensations ...”

“... eight of them at home, asked for an allowance of three shillings a week to see him through the winter: ‘I have done the best I could to keep from the Parish as I know how hard it is to pay Poors Rates.’ Dignity and character (‘My Carricktor will Bear Looking into’) underwrote deservingness. Like ‘rights’, the word ‘dignity’ was rarely ...”

“... to the Lundy principle. This has its roots in a simplified account of the siege of Derry. In the winter of 1688 the Catholic forces of the recently deposed James II surrounded the largely Protestant city. Its governor, Robert Lundy, wanted to negotiate surrender as they didn’t have the resources to withstand a prolonged ...”

“... about inheritance – rolled up her sleeves and fell to work around the estate. Their first winter in residence she delayed returning to London in order to oversee the slaughtering of their pig and teach the cook how to make the famous Wotton pork pies. Now, in 1700, Evelyn told Pepys, his pride shining off the page, she was ‘disposing of our plaine ...”

“... came the famous camel-hair coat, won from a friend during a ferocious game of Monopoly, and worn, winter and summer, like an amulet. It is not clear where or when the dark glasses which completed the new look were acquired. The hint of menace which these, together with the cane, conveyed, was surely intentional: an eager follower of any story containing a ...”

“... if not actively hostile, Catholic population, they could presumably do little harm. In the winter of 1733-4 the cause célèbre in English Court politics was the question of whether Thomas Rundle, another of Queen Caroline’s favourites, would win preferment to the see of Gloucester. In the end, his heterodoxy was deemed too outrageous for an English ...”

“... of the blood-lettings to which Paris – described as the ‘homicidal city’ by the Norman poet Robert Blondel – was prone at this time, are shown to have been critical to the political polarisation of France into two mutually hostile zones. To speak, as Sumption does, of an ‘iron curtain’ partitioning France may be an exaggeration, but the ...”

“... was getting started, to a Yorkshire collector, Henry Savile, and then to the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, whose books came mostly from the dissolution of the monasteries. The Cottonian library also contained the sole extant copy of Beowulf, which in 1731 narrowly escaped destruction in a serious fire. After a spell in the Bodleian the collection ...”

“... Robert Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit. Quotations from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945: ‘Suppose a thousand suns should rise together into the sky: such is the glory of the Shape of the Infinite God.’ Reading that same chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Darjeeling in 1962, Allen Ginsberg thought of something else: the coloured wheels of psilocybin-induced visions ...”

“... state of domesticity, as well as of other forms of confinement. She can sometimes sound very like Robert Burns (both of them wrote poems about mice as the victims of human beings; hers, however, is entirely in the mouse’s voice). Low-roofed cots, cells, shells and alcoves; the caterpillar’s fold of silken web; the human womb: these cramped spaces are ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”