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“... the trains rattling her window and the smell of the sperm-oil works blowing over from Newington Butts. She was 77 years old, a relic of the days of mad King George. She had outlived both her husband and her son. It was her daughter-in-law Caroline, now married to a clerk named Eastwood, who was with her when she died. There were no obituaries. It was a ...”

“... collective scholarly memory’), and also to some extent by Hill himself. Almost alone among the butts of The Dunciad, he tried to reason a volte-face out of Pope; and if to the minds of some readers, notably Macaulay, Hill bested his tormentor in the resulting exchange of letters, for others his stolid decency under Pope’s dazzling fire merely sank him ...”

“... approved school, a place that faced onto a ruined castle said to have given a night’s shelter to Mary Queen of Scots. The escaping Queen was never there at all, but people preferred to think she had never left: every castle in Scotland seeks to have its part in Mary’s story, and her eyes were felt to burn through the ...”

“... the petty vulgarities of Mme Verdurin and the absurdities of Baron de Charlus while in the wet butts on the hills the guns cracked out their empty tattoo and the occasional dead and sodden stag was borne past the window. Duty required that the prime minister and his wife join the house party for a few days, and though not a shot himself he was at least ...”