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“... 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 ...”

“... As a browser, I poked about in it with some interest, noting, for instance, that most of Susan Hill is in the Susan Hill collection at Eton College Library, and that Andrew Motion wrote a letter to E.M. Forster in ‘?1970’ which is under ‘restricted access’ at King’s College Cambridge. But as a writer, listed ...”

“... as an accountant among the big names of the City (Barings, Ansbacher, Singer and Friedlander, Hill Samuel) had prepared him perfectly for his chairmanship of Astra, a burgeoning, middle-ranking arms and explosives company which he had built up since 1981 with the help of the directors of a Scottish fireworks ...”

“... housing developments to run riot over London. There was no central planning. In Schinkel, as Alan Powers has said, we set what England lost in the early 19th century in terms of breadth and seriousness of approach by its failure to come to terms with German thought. Schinkel returned home in August, his search for an appropriate modern style materially ...”

“... On 31 August 1939 Alan Cameron was at his desk at the BBC, where he was secretary to the Central Council of School Broadcasting, when he heard that the British fleet was mobilising. This meant that war with Germany was imminent and Cameron telephoned home to give his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the news. She received it without apparent emotion and with an awkwardness of tone that made an impression on the Irish writer and occasional IRA gunman Sean O’Faolain, with whom she was in bed at the time ...”

“... for the next three decades of frantic entanglement. Bowen had no intention of leaving her husband, Alan Cameron, to whom she was devoted. Their marriage, however, was unconsummated. Ritchie was not her first lover, but at her age, as he ungallantly observed, he might well be her last. She openly adored him, while he, an accomplished ladies’ man, longed for a ...”

“... 18 February. Children are less coy than the Department of Health. In the playground at Primrose Hill Aids is referred to as the Bum Disease. R. on the subject of glasnost: ‘What I want to know is when is Mr Gorbachev going to be on Blankety Blank?’ Oxford, 14 March. To Oxford to cast my vote for Roy Jenkins as Chancellor. Only 9.30, but the line of ...”

“... probably increased the estimate. At one point in 2011 the Merchant Navy War Memorial at Tower Hill was to have been hired out for some bankers’ junket. That a Methodist church in Bournemouth has been bought and reopened as a Tesco is hardly worth mentioning. So what is? Everywhere nowadays has its price and the more inappropriate the setting the ...”

“... as potentially progressive – a romantic attitude that would profoundly influence Lomax’s son Alan. Robinson’s dissonant ‘Abe Lincoln’ draws on Party Secretary Earl Browder’s notorious statement that Communism was 20th-century Americanism, but it was Robinson’s hymn-like music for ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe ...”

“... affectionate. Unashamed of his emotions altogether, as I sat next to him at the funeral of Alan Bates’s son Tristan when he wept throughout. I haven’t always felt so kindly, as when he wrote plays in the 1970s I was very jealous of him (as, I believe, was Pinter). He could run up a play in a week or two, generally when he wasn’t getting anywhere ...”

“... the appearance of the landscape and on patterns of population growth and migration. R.J. Olney and Alan Gilbert investigate those two bastions of the English landed establishment, the county constituencies and the Church of England; and Messrs Howell, Gray and Cullen survey agriculture, tenurial relations and politics on the Celtic fringe. Finally, the view ...”

“... so thick on the ground that we can’t find Larchwood and eventually end up down a cul-de-sac at Hill 60, the slight vantage-point south of the town that changed hands many times during the fighting. Now it’s a bare muddy common with a stone telling its history and a memorial to the dead left entombed in its burrows. There is a carpark and a home-made ...”

“... to a woman who pursues men in a spirit of adventure, because she is afraid of them. Down from the Hill is another novel about discontented middle-aged reminiscence. The narrator of the first section is a 17-year-old factory worker from Nottingham describing a long bicycle ride through the Midlands, 250 miles, stopping at a Youth Hostel and a bed-and-breakfast ...”

“... I can only guess why Shirley Williams is carrying a copy of the News Chronicle, or why Jimmy Hill has an Arab headdress, or why Lord Home stands bat in hand before a broken wicket. Craig Brown says that in his caricatures Boxer mixed ‘the base and the suave’, but there is not a lot of baseness here, not much of the Rowlandson; and such fluent drawing ...”

“... in various ways, not adequate to their needs. One possible move, made famous in the 1960s by Alan Bennett’s String-Alongs, is to ‘knock through’, making a single large living room by joining an existing set of front and back rooms on the ground or first floor. As that cuts the actual number of rooms, excursions are then made into the loft with an ...”