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“... at the bedroom window! The tattered rendition of the Last Post, by a pair of insect-buglers on the hill opposite, didn’t help. A prayer was said; the bouquets deposited; the tremors persisted. I had yet to see any Night of the Living Dead movies at this point; but when I did, back in San Diego a few years later, alone in the cheerless TV ‘den’ of the ...”

“... on apparently dry subjects such as ‘The Shelving and Classification of Printed Books’ (F.J. Hill) or ‘The Acquisitions Policies and Funding of the Department of Printed Books, 1837 – 1959’ (Ilse Sternberg) prove to be extraordinarily illuminating. Paul Cross offers (at last) an authoritative inside history of ...”

“... soda.’) One thinks immediately of Sylvia Plath in her small kitchen, one floor up in Primrose Hill. The last time her husband saw her there, he said, she was ‘upset and crying … tidying the place up’. By the 1980s, our house was full of stuff. Coats in the cupboards, toys in the attic, half-drunk bottles of whisky from Hogmanay. There was so much ...”

“... Kircher, as well as Constantine and St Eustachius. Pilgrims and walkers still climb the hill to see the church, enjoy its splendid views and buy mugs with Kircher’s picture on them. Yet Kircher went wrong on almost every point of fact, and some of his mistakes may not have been innocent. The marble tablet that first informed him he had made a ...”

“... the square, indeed she scarcely seems to have known where it was: ‘One side is chimneys on a hill, I suppose Islington.’ Three months after she moved in she reported ‘a chamber pot in the sitting room and a bed in the dining room’. Her spell there was brief – from August 1939 to October 1940 – and fractured by war. ‘Everybody is feeling the ...”

“... tablet which Sir Frances Drake erected on the coast of California, where it emerged from a sand hill. The specific metal alloy was not in use in the 16th century. The proof was superfluous. Where Drake’s memorial would have written ‘for ever’ the tablet has ‘forever’. Similarly, later grammatical forms on the Minnesota stone. A single word may ...”

“... music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the Whiskey a Go-Go, where dancers would hit the floor accompanied by records played by disc jockeys on a phonograph. Pacine went on to open other clubs in Europe, while in Paris Chez Régine opened in 1960, catering to the self-styled ...”

“... contain nearly a hundred thousand pages of manuscript material. The vast Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan and published in 2003 presents a poet who insistently ‘o’erflows the measure’, to borrow a phrase from Antony and Cleopatra, veering, rather like Shakespeare’s Antony, between the sublime and the bathetic, the uncannily sure-footed and the ...”

“... to pee.” The previous week I went to see my daughter in Brooklyn and I couldn’t make it up the hill and had to stop in a telephone kiosk to pee. “Oh, that’s happened to me,” Roth said. “I’ve done the kiosk thing.” “Well, Phil,” I said. “You always were precocious.”’ We spoke about London. We’d met there once upon a time, at the ...”

“... values. John Winthrop urged the first generation of Puritan settlers to build a ‘City upon a Hill’, yet as they struggled to survive one freezing winter after another, their thoughts turned to the rumoured ‘magnificence’ of an already existing New World metropolis – Americana Mexicana – so advanced it boasted ‘1500 coaches drawn with ...”

“... cover of the most substantial collection, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, edited by Paul Cronin, somehow contrives (it’s not Photoshopped) to pair an implacable-looking Herzog with a grizzly bear standing on its hind legs, jaws agape. Be, if not afraid, then just a little abashed. In the preface to the 2014 edition of the Guide, Cronin ...”

“... us, we have never acquired the adult mind.’ 18 February. Ned Sherrin’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. A friendly service interspersed with songs, some from Sondheim, some from Sherrin and Brahms, but with none of them as tuneful as the hymns. The audience is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson ...”

“... was a roar from the road below and the squeak of tank tracks. A column of Warriors clanked up the hill. The Warrior is a strong fighting vehicle. It can protect a team of soldiers as it carries them into battle. Bullets bounce off it. A single inch-thick shell from its cannon can do terrible damage to anything unarmoured it hits. But these Warriors looked ...”

“... is sinking behind me. The fields are in shadow but, out in front, is a little shining city on a hill. All the west-facing glass catches the light. I am on my way to meet the Ulster Unionist chairman of the local council, who lives next door to my friend Steve. The chairman is a gaunt man with a heavy moustache that gives him a doleful, hangdog look. He ...”

“... In Irish poetry, from Ó Rathaille to the rebel songs, a paradigmatic encounter recurs. Up on a hill, or down by the glenside, the poet meets a woman who celebrates Ireland’s pastand speaks of national redemption. This emblematic figure, often glimpsed in a vision or ‘aisling’, can be a glamorous maiden awaiting her Stuart prince, but she also appears as the ‘poor old woman’ of the patriotic ballads ...”