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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 ...”

“... after the Roman legions departed. At the other pole, six centuries later, stand the heroic liar Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae conjured up Arthurian splendour from scrappy British memories that they had had a champion against the Saxons, and some ingenious Welsh bishops who, furious at the unholy alliance of Anglo-Saxon and Norman ...”

“... Deconstructionists (Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller) and one sympathiser (Geoffrey Hartman), two politically-minded oppositional critics (Edward Said, Frank Lentricchia) and two unclassifiable individualists (Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode). The ninth interviewee is the daddy of academic critics, the man with whom ‘we enter the critical ...”

“... They draw on the Labours of the Months, a pictorial cycle found in manuscripts, sculpture and wall paintings from across medieval Europe, that connects the work of humans in the fields with the passing of the seasons and the movement of the stars. Placing human invention and activity in relation to nature, they lead the viewer towards the divine.The ...”

“... a cigar, a piece of seaweed, a pickled gherkin) at the same time as it revealed the investigator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, to be a doctor with an unfaithful wife. An obsessive with an axe to grind, you might assume. But Braithwaite’s passion for Flaubert stemmed precisely from his own confusions; his loving research was not so much a way to make sense of his ...”

“... companies ailed, if they couldn’t stand on their own two feet, then they would have to go to the wall. There was no room for lame ducks as there had been in the dark days of the Heath Administration of the early Seventies. That government’s slackness towards ailing companies had ushered in all sorts of horrors – strong trade unions, a Labour ...”

“... By grouping them all together under this label, the Christians ‘created an invisible social wall between themselves and their non-Christian neighbours’. To the manning of this wall, they brought the detestation of idolatry characteristic of the jealous God of Israel. For the first time, Christianity hoped to extend ...”

“... Fastolf, an associate of Chaucer’s, and said: ‘I schal naylen him with an arwe to the wow [wall].’ But the arrow never flew. Perhaps it was never drawn. The evidence, detailed as it is, comes from a man who said he was there but had changed sides to discredit the anti-Brembre faction, just like unlucky Thomas Usk. Or perhaps Hochon was bitterly ...”

“... civilian tombs, of course, for those who lived in the abbey’s vicinity or worked for it. Geoffrey Chaucer, the first poet with a grave in the abbey, was buried here in his capacity as a civil servant – he was the abbey’s clerk of works. The embryo of Poets’ Corner lies in Edmund Spenser’s request to be buried near him in 1599.The abbey’s ...”

“... of influence, but baseball, too, has spread around the globe. In an essay in the latest edition, Geoffrey Nunberg notes that ‘it is rare to find a single page of an English-language novel or newspaper that does not reveal what nation it was written in,’ and although the Norton does not include a single text from its own country of publication – unless ...”

“... continued nonetheless. (He began this last following a visit with Nancy Cunard to the Lascaux wall-paintings, themselves then newly come to light.) The two books in effect describe the political arc of Swingler’s life from pacifist-into-socialist Popular Front days, through class war, civil war, world war to postwar Labour Government and the faint ...”

“... out along a tapering ledge, fixes a metal protection nut in a crack, and manoeuvres onto the wall, through the cascade, into the grey, fleeing world of spindrift and squall. Even the wintry twilight (at 11 in the morning) feels to be against us, subduing life. I chill and qualm as Ed places his left toe-tip on an invisible feature, poises with fingerends ...”

“... Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration. In Westminster though, in a building studded with fanciful monuments, he had decided to cool it a little. ‘Visitors sometimes failed to notice this glass,’ Frances Spalding reports, late on in her commendably thorough dual ...”

“... on Pope Rogers follows analytical procedures similar to those of such earlier close-readers as Geoffrey Tillotson and W.K. Wimsatt. When discussing method in the Preface, he declares that ‘doctrinaire method should properly bend before the primacy of the text.’ He gives close, revealing attention to syntax, to hidden numerical symmetries in the ...”

“... boss. But we mustn’t forget that earlier in his career he spent many years behind the Berlin Wall, and once a spy, always a spy: perhaps the offensive face that Lamb presents to the world is a form of cover, like a superhero’s alter ego, and beneath all those filthy layers he’s a lamb with a heart of gold. (Like a superhero, too, he can when ...”