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“... as a distinct category, where moral judgments were, or might have to be, suspended. This poem as I read it records Enright’s encounter with the furious energies of a great artist, an encounter which compels him, at least for the moment, to abandon that reassuring Leavisite conviction. Indeed he not only encounters Hokusai, he is sucked into Hokusai’s ...”

“... even, scandalously, as late as fifteen years ago. We have not heard it all before, unless we have read, as few of us have, Harriet Zinnes’s compendium Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, which all these essayists draw on very heavily. Amiable joking was never what Pound intended, and only a total insensitivity to his tone of voice could lead one to think ...”

“... he/she gets prompter acceptance and payment for a review than for a poem or a story. We have all read about how the essay is itself an honourable genre (obeisances to Michel de Montaigne), and most of us by now know that there is no fixed frontier between literature and journalism: all the same, some writing is designedly ephemeral whereas some isn’t, and ...”

“... a little about some of the great figures in literature during their school years, but they do not read them afterwards. What they do read is for the most part beneath contempt ...   All the great things in the arts and in the sciences have been the creation, very often ‘against the current’ (i.e. in the teeth not ...”

“... which the issue of reader-response would be considered by poets from his day to ours. The widely-read author asks: ‘How many of these many readers are fit readers?’ And the non-selling author asks: ‘Are the fit readers so few?’ The first predicament is the worse. For the non-selling author can always blame his publisher, or his distributors; whereas ...”

“... clusters of brokers’ desks, and you can occasionally see a broker using binoculars to read a distant whiteboard or screen – but a more crucial skill is ‘broker’s ear’: the capacity to monitor what is being said by all the other brokers at nearby desks, despite the noise and while at the same time holding a voicebox conversation with a ...”

“... of poems this dimension of his writing is no longer evident. In none of these 37 poems, as I read them, is there any longer evidence that their author has been attending to the songs from Shakespeare’s plays, to Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, or Marlowe’s translations and imitations of Ovid: they are ‘contemporary’ in an altogether less complicated ...”

“... the apparently hopeless failure of the exiled, isolated Dostoevsky to find what people would now read and what his contacts would now publish. That they went largely ignored in his lifetime is understandable: that they were published at all during the flowering of a whole new generation of novelists says much about the generosity of the Russian ...”

“... clear, the Scots, Irish and Welsh. This means that when he speaks of the British Empire, we should read ‘English’. His own Murray forebears, being however far back Gaelic-speaking Scots, are largely if not entirely exempt from blame for what has happened to the Aborigines. (These latter, of course, are the black allies he speaks of, tenderly, always and ...”

“... confidence: he is forever shuttling between received opinion (received, mostly, from his hero, Donald Davie), and ill-balanced subjectivity. Admittedly, Johnson himself was unreliable, but with him we are usually more interested in the judge than we are in those he’s judging. Johnson is a companion we want to see more of; he’s crusty and he makes us ...”

“... being spoken to, or uttering the grain of their lives.’ (For ‘distanced’, might we not read: ‘surrendered’?) Least forgivingly: ‘because Hill is suspicious of the reader to a fault, and includes the reception of literary work in a writer’s “situation”, that poetic achievement is defined by mystical ...”

“... lovestruck at University. They were in very free measures, and, indeed, very free syntax. I had read enough modern poetry by then to convince myself that rhyme and metre were passé, and that, anyway, the fierce and miserable beating of my heart was not to be contained by what Frost, I believe, called, with seeming disparagement, ‘rhymey-dimey ...”

“... that came to light last week – when a dossier of intelligence reports surfaced online alleging Donald Trump’s eccentric sexual exploits, a long-running conspiracy between Trump and the Russian regime, and inappropriate financial deals over sanctions against Russian companies – read like the plot of a spy novel. None ...”

“... cannot in honesty avoid sounding the note that gave such offence in Poetry and Metamorphosis. We read for instance that ‘Ungaretti, pulling against the current of d’Annunzian heroics, attempted in his early work something similar to that reconstitution of the strength of the syllable and the short verse line such as one finds in Pound and Williams ...”

“... of these essays in The Lords of Limit were originally given as lectures – if they are hard to read, what must they have been like to listen to! Hill, however, won’t compromise. In one essay here he excuses, he almost applauds, the Victorian philosopher T.H. Green for being, as a lecturer, perplexed and perplexing. And in another, which doesn’t ...”