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“... In​ 1972, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson completed Robin Hood Gardens, their only council estate. The couple were famous for projects such as the Mies van der Rohe-inspired Hunstanton School (1954) in Norfolk; the three chamfered, stone-clad towers of the Economist Building (1959-65) in Piccadilly; and the timber-screened Garden Building (1967-70) at St Hilda’s College, Oxford ...”

“... help in the form of the Tenth Legion, who, ‘sacrificing everything to speed’, charged down the hill and up the other side. Today it is cars that career into the steep street, but the landscape is the same and the traffic makes it possible to imagine the ‘fear and the force of the charge’.Moving on and placing his trust in ‘inspiration’ rather than ...”

“... Pop songs run through the sequence, sometimes ironically – the ‘green/On the far side of the hill’ that the New Christy Minstrels sing is now tinged with bile – but more because this is the poetry that people actually hear, unlike Moore’s own. One version begins, brilliantly: ‘I’m like The Winner of The Competition/The one who wrote the ...”

“... work. The new Tate Modern display does well, for example, by videos. In one, made by Gary Hill in 1994, you see his young daughter Anastasia reading from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour. She is pretty and reads very nicely, stumbling only on the odd long word, but not, one assumes, understanding any part of it. Another, Anri Sala’s Dammi i Colori ...”

“... Tottenham Court Road has some well-preserved squares, but nothing to match those parts of Notting Hill that have become so civilised that the work of those who broke terraced houses down into multiple units has in many streets been flipped back. Much has changed since we had our first view of London terraces. Cars have driven children off the streets. The ...”

“... no concessions to high style: Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s Cow-shed and Houses on the Palatine Hill is composed as stolidly as a picture postcard; Thomas Jones’s A Wall in Naples is as uncompromisingly frontal as a surveyor’s photograph for an insurance claim: all you see is a wall, a door, a window, the top of what looks like a fig tree, some washing ...”

“... on a chosen bit of coast brings her closer to Frank Auerbach, who has concentrated on Primrose Hill, than to painters who made brush marks more like her own. When you think about what kind of artist she was, putting her child-invaded studio and Lucian Freud’s naked-friend-and-acquaintance-laden chairs and couches side by side suggests a common attitude ...”

“... is so similar in its elements – naked figures, warmish in colour, holding hands against a green hill with a blue sky above – that it is hard to believe there is no connection with the Matisse. It is even signed and dated in similar script in the same corner. The effect, however, is utterly different. The blond boy’s girlish face, the black-haired ...”

“... are likely to be a group of runic inscriptions on three fifth-century cremation urns from Spong Hill in Norfolk. The inscriptions simply read alu, which probably means ‘ale’. Perhaps the early speakers of Old English longed for ale in death as well as life. But, as the British Library’s exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (until 19 February) displays, the ...”

“... acquired a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both ...”

“... last Christmas season before the war he was given the part of Slightly, one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. Forty years later, Kenneth Tynan wrote of him that ‘in 1913 he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.’ It was not exactly ...”

“... The talking had been stilted to begin with; it became a conversation. ‘We were walking up a hill quite slowly, much more like gentlemen walking in a Berkshire beechwood after a heavy Sunday lunch.’ With Erasmos, he drove on to Concepción and then to Los Angeles, in Bío Bío, where he saw a railway bridge built by Gustave Eiffel. Hugh flew to Buenos ...”

“... the wood is polished and gouged – the grain follows the form as contours follow the slope of a hill – and led to analyses such as David Sylvester’s of the 1945-46 Reclining Figure: ‘the sacrificed and resurrected god of a fertility rite … at once skeletal and alive, prone in burial and flowering into new life’. The carvings in this room provide a ...”

“... in the exhibition have the sky that fades from vibrant blue to pale yellow; three have a rocky hill, distant buildings and a reflecting lake; all include dark evergreen foliage against which naked figures stand out. And the figures – above all the pale young women, sometimes Eve, sometimes Venus, sometimes another deity – are standard too. Cranach Girl ...”

“... Garrick’s bedroom furniture and her dress side by side; to have Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Gothickery as well as his limewood neck cloth (carved by Grinling Gibbons, and worn at least once as a joke) and his coin and medal cabinet, inlaid with wood and decorated with little ivories; to have the 17th-century samplers and embroideries made by Martha ...”