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“... that Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision never to write consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T.J. Binyon, in ...”

“... he was born, but it was an excuse to play with a new archive. I found him straight away. Edward Reginald Hill was just where I expected him to be, in Eltham, South London, an only child living with his parents. It was a bigger household than I had realised. His maternal grandfather and great-grandmother were living with them, but the address was more ...”

“... lingers in hope of hearing the first cuckoo of spring. From the ‘steep shoulder’ of Wheatham Hill, she looks down on the curving wood – or ‘hanger’ as she calls it, typically preferring the more arcane term – ‘coiled like a great snake of beech and oak’. She is there again on New Year’s Eve, ‘walking in the fields on the last of those ...”

“... was a shabby Victorian cul-de-sac running parallel to the Hammersmith and City Line in Notting Hill. The street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no ...”

“... Enthusiasts would drive to the village of Boughton after nightfall just to park at the top of the hill and watch in amazement as the lorries hauled themselves up and out of the village, shattering the night with blazing lights and roaring engines – and, as was surely registered by the Tolkien-addled hippies among the nocturnal onlookers, with all the ...”

“... unexplained, which Gladstone, for example, was to imitate. It is true that as long ago as 1910 Reginald Lucas wrote a revealing book, Lord Glenesk and the ‘Morning Post’, which revealed many details of the fascinating relationship between Palmerston and the press, and that Stephen Koss in the first volume of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in ...”

“... peace; unfinished at his death in 2017, it has been seamlessly completed by his widow, Rosemary Hill. In Interwar, Stamp is scrupulously equitable and veers towards a sort of stylistic indifferentism: everything engages him, even junk neo-Georgian buildings that are beyond meretricious. He celebrates variety, eccentricity and figures from oblivion who have ...”

“... was said to have breathed ‘the atmosphere of the Council of Nicaea’ rather than Harrow-on-the-Hill, but his ineptness cannot explain why Westminster’s pupil numbers were also plummeting (from 300 in 1821 to 67 twenty years later), as were Shrewsbury’s, Winchester’s and Rugby’s. This widespread crisis of recruitment must have had more to do with ...”

“... above the tannin scum: leathery seaweed, wads of yellow paper. They tiptoe out, speeded-up Benny Hill, over sharp stones, to neat piles of folded clothes. The watched, towelled down and returned to their balconies, rusting rails and anti-gull devices, become the watchers. A slow-motion cinema of such tender boredom that they will never move again. Along the ...”

“... Wilde to homosexuality at the age of 32, stood by him to the end, and he was supported by Reginald Turner and Frank Harris. They were joined by Jean Dupoirier, proprietor of the Paris hotel in which Wilde died, and perhaps of all his friends the most disinterested and serviceable. It is easy to say that Wilde brought his distress on himself. The ...”

“... of little people.’ She is less provoked by the adventures of Janeites like Constance and Ellen Hill, who at the beginning of the 20th century made a pilgrimage to the places associated with Austen. They ran into trouble before they even reached Steventon: no one had heard of the nearby hamlet of Clarken Green where they had planned to spend the night. When ...”

“... large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ Visiting Northern Ireland as home secretary in 1970, Reginald Maudling, whose mellow moderation verged on a slothful desire for an easy life, was understandably exasperated by the Ulster problem – but no more so than a long line of politicians, before and since. Churchill – not so easily depicted as a ...”

“... to anything which might further the reformation of the Christian religion’. As his successor, Reginald Pole, wisecracked a few weeks later, ‘other perjurers be wont to break their oath after they have sworn, you break it before.’ Two days later, Cranmer rammed through both houses of Convocation the declaration that Henry’s brother Arthur had ...”

“... to the European movements of their time. The chief actor in Fires of Faith is not Mary herself but Reginald Pole, the churchman who was the queen’s closest adviser in her campaign, and who had spent much of his life in exile. Born in the year 1500, Pole was a Plantagenet, with a claim to the English throne. Both his grandfather, George, Duke of Clarence, and ...”

“... Jane Austen’s novels’. He is supported, moreover, by an equally classic account of the writer, Reginald Farrer’s 1917 essay, which remarks: ‘Never again does the writer introduce a character so entirely irrelevant as Margaret Dashwood.’ They are right, of course. But such fighting terms from critics so unsafe to disagree with are useful in ...”