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“... in trepidation and worked towards with confidence. Unless, which seems unlikely, Montale wrote a hill of material in the very year of his death, there is not much that escapes its purview. It contains all the poems, all the variants which led up to the established texts, and a closely relevant selection from the poet’s prose, ranging from pertinent ...”

“... loved, as his several ventures into poetry confirm: Low lies their home ’mongst many a hill, In fruitful and deep delved womb; A little village, safe, and still, Where pain and vice full seldom come, Not horrid noise of warlike drum. Shepherds who pipe on about their loves and their sheep and lead lives magically in tune with an idyllic and ...”

“... for his own work, and the start of an important – perhaps his most important – friendship. Michael Ramsbotham was also a writer, five years younger than Henry Reed, and from a more privileged background. After Charterhouse, from which he was expelled, he went up to King’s College, Cambridge. At the end of his second year, in June 1940, he was called ...”

“... just behave with politeness – for the rest – she’s had it.’ In his biography of Williams, Michael Freedland gives a fuller account of this incident. He explains the basis of the sketch – two spies complaining about the uselessness of their technical gadgetry – and quotes Fenella Fielding: ‘We both had death pills. I would die first leaving him ...”

“... that was celebrated in stories, songs, sand sculpture, ochre paint. Every rock, river, mountain, hill, camp, track and ritual spot on the continent has had many names in its time, so that even the most deserted place has a history. The imprint of the first inhabitants has been overlaid: in the last two hundred years, all parts of the continent have been ...”

“... and Greenwich were finer than any view in the world, even in Constantinople; and at Backbury Hill, in Herefordshire, Evelyn had learned, there was an ideal site for his Elysium. It was ‘no phantasticall Utopia but a reall place’, with a mountain, groves of oak, a green plain, ‘a most horrid and deepe precipice, fitted for Solitary Grotts and ...”

“... produced by ‘genteelisms’: ‘a forty-minute hike brought the dog and I to the top of the hill.’ A belated disciple of Fowler, Amis abhors Elegant Variation: ‘If the President seemed to support the Radicals in New York, in Washington he appeared to back the Conservatives.’ This is not only Elegant Variation but Pointless Chiasmus, a crime I have ...”

“... known at all, as one of a group of youngish Conservatives who had been christened ‘the Notting Hill set’ by Derek Conway, an MP from a rival faction. In this context, Notting Hill, where Cameron and many of his friends live, connotes wealth, organic food, possible drugginess and a degree of social ...”

“... in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a placenta. At that time I don’t think I knew what a placenta was except that I knew it didn’t come with chips.11 September. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he ...”

“... Millennium Experience, set ablaze. Flames visible across the river from Beckton Alp to Parliament Hill. ‘A man said to have a slight Irish accent said: “This is the IRA. We have planted bombs at the southern entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. For goodness sake, do something about it. We want the area cleared.”’ So Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian ...”

“... corps dutifully reported the official Pentagon version of events. A US navy captain called Mark Hill, who was working on a project for McNamara, eventually let Hersh in on the real, catastrophic story. (Hill was one of the honourable soldiers on whom Hersh came to rely.) ‘I remember being angry, of course, but also more ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... Perfect examples of what this sort of thing leads to were provided by the missions to Moscow of Michael Foot and later of Neil Kinnock. The Kremlin’s defence specialists, accustomed to Bundestag deputies able to discuss throw-weights, Mirving, telemetry and so forth, discovered that the British MPs, for all their passionate dedication to disarmament, had ...”

“... to The Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to ...”

“... opponents may derive from scenes like that of President Reagan scurrying around Capitol Hill to drum up support for the International Monetary Fund – an institution he had spent a lifetime denouncing as an organ of crypto-communist world government – why should the Third World debt crisis be remembered by history, even after the debts are ...”