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“... on,      And warn me of the time that’s gone. Or where I found thy yellow bed Below the hill-borne fir-tree’s head, And heard the whistling east wind blow Above, while wood-screen’d down below I rambled in the spring-day’s glow   And watch’d the low-ear’d hares up spring   From cover, and the birds take wing.      Come winter ...”

“... takes a lively movement in making it with pen or pencil. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753) Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), is set during the summer of 1983. The narrator, William Beckwith, is a young aristocrat of leisure. He lives in Holland Park, swims at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street ...”

“... The first poem of For the Unfallen (1958), Geoffrey Hill’s first book, was entitled ‘Genesis’. It declared: By blood we live, the hot, the cold, To ravage and redeem the world: There is no bloodless myth will hold. Hot blood is at the heart of Hill’s theological, oppositional poetics ...”

“... people have for me. In the local post office where I go every morning for the papers I am ‘Mr Alan’, though Zaiman with his filmstar looks just calls me ‘Alan’ (and occasionally pats my arm). The English lady (from Kent) in Shepherd Foods who wears a burka calls me ‘Mr Bennett’ and because it’s the way ...”

“... to be innocent, a thunderclap of unheralded revelation. These reflections are prompted by Geoffrey Hill’s formidably erudite and compacted essay, ‘Our Word is Our Bond’, which reappears now in The Lords of Limit, a volume which, it must be said, in everything from format to price does very great credit to the publishers. This particular essay has ...”

“... was eight in the morning and Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light above the Black Craig. The hill itself – seen from our kitchen window – was still in silhouette, though the sky was lightening to a pale yellow-grey. It was a weakling light, stealing into the world like a thief through a window someone forgot to close. The talk was all of Christmas ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after the first fire, and reservations continue to be voiced, notably by the Glasgow architect Alan Dunlop, a trenchant critic of the present regime at the school. But a Strategic Outline Business Case commissioned by the GSA concluded that reconstruction was viable – the walls remain largely intact – and in 2022 the art school launched a competition ...”

“... dry while Sarah struggles round the kitchen with enormous fish pies. ‘It was all very Notting Hill but fun.’ Swire congratulates Cameron on his recent ‘Falklands moment’, using his veto to keep Britain out of the EU accord designed to stabilise the Eurozone by imposing new budgetary rules on all members. He laughs and says she’s ‘such a ...”

“... liberal triumphalism is offered by Marxism, and it’s no surprise to find Christopher Hill claiming that some sort of Whiggism is inescapable, nor to find Professor Pocock and Dr Clark denouncing Marxist historians as Whigs. The Marxist construes the 18th century as the century of the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie: Locke was their ...”

“... sinew to the state of commercial apotheosis which is awaiting it upon the cinema screen. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and William Peter Blatty’s Legion (‘The sequel to The Exorcist’) very neatly illustrate this parting of the ways. If Susan Hill’s ‘ghost story’ is not a pastiche, it is undoubtedly an ...”

“... in Fiction, Theatre and Cinema’. Imitation even of the most laconic entries is difficult. Only Alan Hollinghurst, among Bradley’s examples, gets it nearly right. But Pevsner was if not an unconscious then an incidental stylist. The greatest understatement in The Buildings of England is unrhetorical and comes at the end of his account of his working ...”

“... he leaves office into a cottage he is planning to build on what they affectionately call ‘Our Hill’. The President’s secretary, who lives at the White House (and has lived with the President since he was Governor of New York), thinks her boss will be moving into the cottage with her. The President’s wife, another cousin, stays in her own fieldstone ...”

“... was on show, accompanied by Judy Egerton’s fine catalogue, there was also a video, narrated by Alan Bennett. As it finished on the day I was there, the woman in front of me said to her friend: ‘Well, I should hope they weren’t all like that.’ It was a very Bennett moment, as distinct from a Hogarthian one. ‘Missing the point’ was not in ...”

“... Furillo might be cool in dead-ball situations but he’s no Glenn Hoddle, and we all know that at Hill Street no one ever heard of a slow-motion replay ...So it goes, or so it’s meant to go. But something jars. The jaunty build-up – our old buddy welcomed back, our prized weekend routines restored – ought to discover an answering jauntiness in us. It ...”