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“... as Jeremy Treglown does very effectively in his biographies of Henry Green and V.S. Pritchett, as Rosemary Hill does in her magical biography of Pugin – but to me a lively new aspect of the form is to be found in the work of those who involve themselves most visibly in their subjects’ dilemmas and who name their own troubles in the narrative as and ...”

“... something of a shock.’ In​ 1951, Carter passed the 11-plus and won a funded place at Streatham Hill and Clapham High, a girls-only direct-grant grammar school. She wrote about ‘the glum, sullen loathing that overcame me’ as she ‘daily slouched and dawdled’ her way there, and how much she hated maths and PE. But she was great at English and French ...”

“... results in a comeuppance. The whole thing is tempered by the ‘good-natured assumption’ that Rosemary Hill identified in Cooper’s Class, that ‘everyone is a snob about something and to that extent we are all ridiculous.’ There is mercifully little of the product placement that makes some airport fiction unreadable; instead the books rely on ...”

“... is plenty of space to dream and wonder and imagine and – let’s face it – make stuff up. As Rosemary Hill points out in her wonderful book on Stonehenge, archaeologists sometimes claim ownership of the past, but the truth is that it belongs to all of us – and, as the case of Stonehenge shows, archaeologists are capable of doing plenty of ...”

“... well to forget your own advice. 2. Last April I began to write an account of the life and death of Rosemary Nelson, a 40-year-old solicitor in the town of Lurgan in County Armagh. At 12.40 p.m. on 15 March she got into her car outside her house at 5 Ashgrove Grange. As she drove away a bomb went off in the car. She lost both legs and suffered fatal abdominal ...”

“... dropped. The green heath silvered: every leaf singled out like rosemary. The well went milky as a dead eye, smoked with ice, though I caught sight of something as the surface froze – a clay doll, a corp criadh, busied with pins – and I started down for home. Where far below I saw the loch-water going from grey to ...”

“... Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan (a well-named pair) have assembled the testimonies of a lot of naughty American nuns and ex-nuns who chafed under the restrictions of convent life. One restriction in particular galled them all: the embargo on sexual activity. Few nuns, it seems, are natural celibates. Fewer still are heterosexual ...”

“... Knoxes and Burne-Jones. Such details come mainly from Fitzgerald’s letters to her daughters. As Rosemary Hill noticed when reviewing them for this paper (25 September 2008), none of them is to Valpy. He didn’t keep them, Lee says, but there was more to it than that. As the eldest and as a boy, Valpy perhaps felt the Knox pressure more than his ...”

“... enough tragedy of their own, enough worry, without having to deal with the committal hearing of a Rosemary West, whose charge-sheet, if proved true, could make her the most gruesome female killer Britain has ever known. Those charges have of course still to be proved, and the proceedings this week in Dursley will end in a decision about whether the case can ...”

“... Death: in Père-Lachaise cemetery death has no sting. A small city on a beautifully wooded hill, it has more of the feeling of a park in the English sense than formal French parks. Those French vaults like little stone telephone kiosks somehow have no feeling of death, and though it is claimed that the place is not well tended and is used as a ...”

“... believe Keith Colquhoun, and – best news of all – none of us need fear we are too far over the hill to find them. At the centre of his third novel, Kiss of Life, is ex-headmistress Miss Macgregor, experiencing the death-in-life of retirement in a seaside hotel. The horrors of extreme loneliness – the hoarding up of crumbs of conversation, the eking out ...”

“... I can only guess why Shirley Williams is carrying a copy of the News Chronicle, or why Jimmy Hill has an Arab headdress, or why Lord Home stands bat in hand before a broken wicket. Craig Brown says that in his caricatures Boxer mixed ‘the base and the suave’, but there is not a lot of baseness here, not much of the Rowlandson; and such fluent drawing ...”

“... can’t be looked straight in the eye: ‘each man fixed his eyes before his feet./Flowed up the hill and down King William Street’. This sampling outlines a familiar story about the modern city: it’s the place where the strength that was meant to come in numbers has been hollowed out or fractured. Carlyle saw London as ‘a huge aggregate of little ...”

“... is best exemplified by the claim in its tie-in novel that ‘the victory of Arthur at Badon Hill was so complete and so devastating that the Saxon army retreated for ever from Britain’ – which, if true, would mean that we must all be speaking Welsh to this day. Its grip on geography is if anything even worse. But the real point is that the film is ...”