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“... straight or that one has the necessary stamina to keep the job, but it is a prerequisite.’) Geoffrey Grigson, so much older than Gunn (he is 77), has of course built his career about being considered impertinent, so it’s not surprising to find in his latest collection (his first was in 1939) runovers like these: So mud was on you that day. So it was ...”

“... shared an insomniac watch over words. The uses to which Housman has been put are something else. Geoffrey Hill noted that ‘the century-long chronicle of the varied fortunes of A Shropshire Lad is not without its grotesqueries,’ and these are among Parker’s themes. His title is itself a challenge, with its air of Heritage ersatz. Housman was averse ...”

“... being shaped under great pressure.’ But what really made me sit up straight was his remark about Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Annunciations’, the last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but ...”

“... committed in the fog of war) persists to this day. The novel was translated into English by Geoffrey Dunlop in 1934. But Dunlop, a well-respected translator, decided to cut a substantial part of it: passages about Armenian culture and traditions, as well as ‘harrowing’ pages about the rape and slaughter of women and children that he considered too ...”

“... compared with his creative peers – Larkin, Heaney, or the greatest ‘maker’ of his generation Geoffrey Hill, with his confessedly ‘deficient sense of the anecdotal’ – that is where he belongs. From that early fabling phase, when Sylvia Plath heard about ‘a little wizard named Snatchcraftington, who looks like a stalk of rhubarb’, through ...”

“... and a wild eccentric in his social manner, as well as in his disorderly mandarin-style beard (Geoffrey Hill was apparently reminded of Empson when he saw a prize-winning Yorkshire terrier). At Richards’s funeral he read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The organiser of the event, Richard Luckett, described him as speaking ‘inaudibly and inexactly ...”

“... them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent series ...”

“... any such crew would include both A.S. Byatt and Jilly Cooper or place Jeffrey Archer alongside Geoffrey Hill. How, if at all, are these two vignettes from the literary life of the period to be connected? Should we be wondering about the ways commercial changes in the world of publishing affected the standing of authors? Should we be thinking about the ...”

“... years, but the dot paintings are a creation of the 1970s, when the (white) artist and teacher Geoffrey Bardon asked a group of displaced Aboriginal children at Papunya, west of Alice Springs, to paint a mural. He encouraged them to portray their legends, which prompted some of the adults to join in: their depiction of the travels of Honey Ant Ancestor led ...”

“... with at least an adequate historical knowledge of the campaign. But even if it were true, as Geoffrey Moorhouse claims, that ‘no battle or campaign fought between 1914 and 1918 has ever been remembered quite so tenaciously as the ill-fated Allied expedition to the Dardanelles,’ this would not be the result of any literary work. Rupert Brooke, setting ...”

“... garden of ideas. Not only is the space and time lacking, if George Plumtre’s essay on Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe’s gardens at Sutton Place is to be believed, we also seem to have lost our grip on even simple symbolism. Sir Geoffrey apparently uses stepping-stones across the pond to symbolise the hazards on the route to ...”

“... Dirck van Baburen. The caption states that it was ‘known to be a forgery’ when it was given to Geoffrey Webb, a professor at the institute, who donated it to the collection in 1960. This was not the impression given to viewers in 2011, when the picture was the subject of the first episode of the BBC series Fake or Fortune. At that point the Courtauld ...”

“... to the utterly unreliable History of the Kings of Britain by the 12th-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lud rebuilt the walls of London, ‘encircling it with countless towers. He also commanded the citizens to construct houses … so that no city in all the surrounding kingdoms (some far distant) could boast finer residences.’ London was ...”

“... and Tamils in Sri Lanka, Dhaka’s suppression of the native inhabitants of the Bangladesh Hill Tracts, and a new crisis in Pakistan; guerrillas and drugs in Peru and Colombia; Northern Ireland; the deteriorating situation of blacks and urban violence in America itself: the sites of violent death and destitution in the world now, and the seeming ...”

“... described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I have an open mind about queer-bashing,’ Waugh’s diary reflected, ‘from one point of view it seems rather cruel … I simply ...”