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“... no world, just the set or the simulation where the conversations take place. When directors like Michael Mann, whose movie version of Miami Vice has just opened, say they want to make episodes of television series as if they were movies, they mean, among other things, that they want to create a world, a location which is a kind of character. This is as true ...”

“... hundreds of babies from Kuwaiti incubators. It ignored the story that the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton, paid millions of dollars by Kuwait, had orchestrated the television testimonies to the alleged atrocity, that the unidentified female eyewitness was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and that the only documented ...”

“... his crew had found themselves in Paris in May 1968 in the thick of the événements. His producer, Michael Gill, recalls ‘riot police … just off-camera’, adding, laconically: ‘I was gassed.’ Despite being so apparently out of sympathy with the temper of ‘these days’, Civilisation was hugely popular. Now, when even more of what Clark stood for ...”

“... heartnear’. Geoffrey Hill had a good time with the title of Celan’s collection Atemwende, or Breathturn (1967). In The Orchards of Syon (2002) he anglicises ‘breathturn’ into ‘turn of breath’. But he also has ...”

“... Harvard. Slowly, he went crazy, and Doctor Millet was needed again, his asylum now being in Silver Hill, Connecticut. Minty killed himself, in the asylum, in March 1964, hanged himself with a neck-tie. There had been homosexual impulses, and he had said: ‘I’m not sure whether I’m Francis Junior or Francis Senior.’ Stein and Plimpton’s staccato ...”

“... by Surrey, who cut off the Scottish army’s route north, forcing it to move to Branxton Hill, where its cannon could not be effectively positioned. James was still confident enough to risk battle against the smaller English army, but the resulting clash on 9 September 1513 was a disaster for the Scots. In a valley to the north of his camp on Flodden ...”

“... me with envy. The Institute of Historical Research in Budapest has extensive quarters on Castle Hill and over sixty paid researchers on its staff. The comparable English Institute in London has modest quarters in the Senate House and no paid researchers. The Hungarian Academy has a palace all to itself just across from the Parliament House: colonnaded ...”

“... long a-coming. Meanwhile I content myself with an occasional stretch of my legs up Parliament Hill and find even that hard going. My car engine would, I am sure, run excellently if I let it. My physical engine seems to be grinding to a halt. Catherine Karolyi, who has just died at the age of 93, was a treasured friend of mine. She started long ago as ...”

“... You​ would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill often addressed in his later works ...”

“... appear. For a day and a half there was much talk of Mr Holmes. How would he appear? Over what hill? Across what pond? From time to time messages would arrive which we carefully decoded. Then suddenly a man in a field called threateningly to us: were we looking for Mr Sherlock Holmes? We agreed that we were. He pointed onwards and we increased our ...”

“... as much for his sake as for mine) for an unofficial Heaney – along the lines of Michael Hamburger’s book of Rilke, called An Unofficial Rilke – makes me conclude that the official and the unofficial in him are never far from each other, like two sides of the same coin. The poem with ‘boozed’ and ‘borean’ is the one that also has ...”

“... from Caroline Kipling’s diaries for his biography. Moreover, although the letters to Mrs Edmonia Hill were bought and destroyed, they had been copied, however inaccurately. These copies have survived and are invaluable for Kipling’s last two years in India. All this destruction did not prevent views of Kipling being obtainable from his private writings. It ...”

“... do him any harm and that he will not be vanquished ‘until/Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him’) he doesn’t go to see them, since they are already in the castle. They show up in the roof, among the high beams. It is a fine directorial touch. The witches are often seen as escapees from Macbeth’s mind, and they are ...”

“... visible at night from her bedroom window, were too much for her. To borrow a line from Geoffrey Hill, it’s not always easy to be ‘too near the ancient troughs of blood’. The central action of the film involves not the ovens, or Höss’s later promotion to commandant of commandants, but the possibility that Hedwig may have to leave the house (and ...”

“... The man reluctantly accepts the lift but ducks out of the celebration, and climbs a very steep hill to his home, a sort of lean-to that looks as if it will fall 0ff the cliff at any moment. Nothing goes right for him: he can’t even light a cigarette without lighting the stove. But then he smokes and settles down. And goes to visit a very different ...”