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“... he leaves office into a cottage he is planning to build on what they affectionately call ‘Our Hill’. The President’s secretary, who lives at the White House (and has lived with the President since he was Governor of New York), thinks her boss will be moving into the cottage with her. The President’s wife, another cousin, stays in her own fieldstone ...”

“... picture with a cosier domestic appeal shows the one-time home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Headington Hill Hall, near Oxford, now the ‘council house’ seat of Robert Maxwell, lit up by rockets at night, with a huge illuminated sign saying ‘Happy Birthday Bob’ suspended from a tall tree. Perhaps because the picture does not show the full dimensions of ...”

“... Furillo might be cool in dead-ball situations but he’s no Glenn Hoddle, and we all know that at Hill Street no one ever heard of a slow-motion replay ...So it goes, or so it’s meant to go. But something jars. The jaunty build-up – our old buddy welcomed back, our prized weekend routines restored – ought to discover an answering jauntiness in us. It ...”

“... that he unearthed from a local hillside. Smith, a farmer’s son, said he’d been directed to the hill by an angel, and the book was therefore evidence of Smith’s own status as a prophet, as well as of a new dispensation of Christ’s gospel on earth. The Mormon canon also includes the Old and New Testaments, a collection of modern revelations (mostly to ...”

“... account of working for Citroën. The rational solution for the West is the one beckoning in the hill-towns of the Emilia Romagna, where small, capital-intensive shops employing skilled craftsmen and designers working in tandem are taking over skilled production work which the mass-production giants of the Po valley have proved too inflexible to undertake ...”

“... a botanical cluster some of us have never heard of? Or why would a poet dig up the echo? Geoffrey Hill writes of a tendency to ‘crave ambiguity in plain speaking/as I do’ (in ‘In Memoriam: Ernst Barlach’), but Rimbaud seems to be mocking the poverty of his mother tongue, its miserly repetition of similar sounds for such different purposes.But then of ...”

“... even if not at your accustomed rate. I notice a slight shortage of breath when going up Parliament Hill but this passes if I go faster. I don’t expect to manage Coniston Old Man again but I hope Loughrigg Fell will not be beyond me, and of course Tennyson Down is still easy territory. Though I walk more slowly, I read as fast as ever, whch is an essential ...”

“... the classic British style of ‘sympathetic’ interviewing – as practised, for example, by Michael Aspel, Miriam Stoppard or Jimmy Young – has an ancient lineage. Eden’s problem was not so much that he thought he was terrific on TV (though he did), but that he saw television as essentially a kind of megaphone for the Government. So it was with the ...”

“... Were Orphans (reviewed in the LRB, 5 October and 13 April) are quoted at 2-1 and 5-2 with William Hill. And it’s difficult to fancy the four other shortlisted novelists. Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place – the 7-1 outsider and the only first novel on the list – is narrated by Dolores Gauci, a young girl whose Maltese father gambled away his Cardiff ...”

“... Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy does for the market what the London Dungeon does for urban history. It’s a compendium of horror stories arising from what one might call the ryanairation of social life, the breakdown of once cash-free practices into severally billable units of account. Capitol Hill lobbying outfits now pay queuing firms to stand in line, sometimes overnight, so that the lobbyists can step in just before a committee session starts; ‘concierge’ medical companies offer queue-jumping treatment to those willing to stump up the fees ...”

“... 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... going to ring a bit hollow to anyone who likes these other series, glossy as they are, or thinks Hill Street Blues and LA Law are among the best things American television has ever done. I don’t really doubt the authenticity of The Wire, its proliferation of unpulled punches, but it isn’t good because it’s authentic, it looks authentic because it’s ...”

“... simulacra of humans that look like waxworks. This singular artist designed a house for himself, Hill Barn, on the downs near Mere. Orbach’s description of Hill Barn as ‘slightly French’ is unexceptionable. There is indeed an oeil de boeuf window. It belongs to no school, though there is some affinity with another ...”

“... a scholarship to Cambridge. Still, they have plenty in common. They take turns kissing a George Michael poster, read Jackie Collins’s bonkbusters and fancy the same bad boy, Hammad.Shamsie makes clear from the start that the girls belong to different parts of Karachi’s upper middle class. Extreme wealth buffers the Khans’ experience of everyday ...”