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“... Soyez mysterieuses,’ Paul Gauguin had carved into the lintel of his last residence in the South Seas, the ‘House of Pleasure’, or ‘House of Orgasm’, as some would translate Maison du Jouir. ‘I am not a painter who copies nature – today less than before. With me everything happens in my crazy imagination ...”

“... desart yet unclaim’d by Spain? The answer to the question posed in these lines quoted by Paul Mapp in The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire turned out to be a resounding yes. In 1738, when Dr Johnson wrote his poem, some two-thirds of North America was still terra incognita, as far as Europeans were concerned. A vast expanse of territory, home ...”

“... the training session and stretched the shirts over our knees, all the better to roll down Toad Hill in one round movement before dousing the shirts in the industrial swamp at the bottom. The destruction of footballing equipment was beyond the pale: we were too young for Barlinnie Prison, so we got banned to Home Economics instead and were soon the ...”

“... the early 19th century, thanks to improved policing and safer ways of transmitting money, Shooters Hill and Hounslow Heath were losing much of their terror. The end of the wars with France freed thousands of soldiers and sailors, many of whom in other times might have been tempted into highway robbery; as it was a number of the hardier spirits indulged in a ...”

“... of life, and its continuous shadowing by What Might Be. It seems, in short, no accident that Paul Muldoon – whose brilliant new book Quoof gives support to most of the claims being made for ‘narrative poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived ...”

“... The section starts as if recounting part of Armand’s history – ‘In the mid-1960s, Paul Buer and his best friend Armand arrived in Oslo to study at the university at Blindern’ – but the focus soon shifts to Paul, and then to Jan Brosten, ‘with whom Paul would ...”

“... Few​ today remember Captain Henry Hill (1812-82), a military tailor turned quartermaster of the First Sussex Rifle Volunteers. According to the Brighton census of 1881, Hill, who was then in his late sixties, lived on ‘funded property’ at 53 Marine Parade with his wife, Charlotte; his 27-year-old nephew, James; and three servants ...”

“... there’s a deep sense of abandonment.’ The family lived in a $40-a-month apartment in the Hill (known locally as Little Harlem), a lively mixed community, a five-minute drive from downtown Pittsburgh. Wilson remembered his father being ‘mostly not there. You stayed out of his way if he was.’ But Wilson was privy to many of Fritz’s violent ...”

“... turtles.’ The turtles kettled the marchers to the east. I heard a libertarian carrying a Ron Paul sign discuss capitalism with a socialist. Could a pizza oven be owned by everyone who cooked and served the pizzas? Then it started to rain. One group of stalwarts danced up Tampa Street. The turtles marched away, singing ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’. Somebody ...”

“... Factory, his life in a flat on a South London estate (the nearest Tube, rather oddly, is Tower Hill), his work in a record shop, and his hatred for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. With an unerring gift for making the worst of things he takes Madeline to Phantom of the Opera, queuing for five and a half hours only to see the last tickets go to those just ...”

“... the Ossianic fragments now we often hear in them the voices of later poets. ‘Who cometh from the hill, like a cloud tinged with the beam of the west? Whose voice is that, loud as the wind, but pleasant as the harp of Carry1?’ To these questions from the fourth fragment, I’m tempted to answer that the voice is that of Walt Whitman, the great self-styled ...”

“... sectarianism: this is one of the points underlined in the collection of essays Across a Roaring Hill (subtitled ‘The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland’), which Edna Longley co-edited in 1985. Some of the contributors to this book sought to distinguish between the imaginations of certain Protestant writers, and a Protestant, or Catholic, cast of ...”

“... painted, cooked, travelled and made love in something like contentment. She was at the Slade with Paul Nash (who gave her his braces, taking them off on top of a bus), and through him or through Nevinson she might have become an illustrator, as they were, for the Poetry Bookshop. She could have learned etching from Sickert, always generous to beginners, or ...”

“... that the first poem in the book is as simple as it is, asserting that Scafell Pike, ‘the tallest hill in England’, will still be there when its man-made surroundings have ceased to be: No roofs, no town, Maybe no men, But yonder where a lather-rinse of cloud pours down The spiked wall of the sky-line, see, Scafell Pike, Still there. It is ...”

“... waver/Into language. Do not waver in it,’ Heaney says to himself, but that’s as hopeless as Paul Celan telling himself to ‘rise up against/multiple meanings.’ The fact that these poets issue such instructions to themselves at all is proof that they need to.A hankering (perhaps as much for his sake as for mine) for an unofficial Heaney – along the ...”