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“... My wife and I are on a strange sort of anti-pilgrimage that began ten days ago on the Tuscan hill of Montesenario, an hour’s stiff bicycling above our hotel in Bivigliano. We change down hurriedly into our lowest gear as the road climbs past locked metal gates leading to villas shuttered against the heat – then dismount equally hurriedly and push our ...”

“... often fraught. In St Ives, where she remained alone, she quarrelled with nearly everyone, from Peter Lanyon to the local taxi firm. In her last years, finding herself not in Olympian isolation, merely lonely, she drank heavily. Perhaps she misunderstood herself – perhaps Wood did too. Neither was, by temperament, an artist in the high romantic cast they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender of Horizon, Craxton found a friend, an indulgent patron and a way into the avant-garde. He had a narrow brush with conscription, from which ...”

“... soul-stripping illness whose details Bayley did not spare. After her death in 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his ...”

“... take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and ...”

“... and free’, which enacts Thomas’s encounters with the contingent even as it narrates them. As Peter Sacks notes in his introduction, Frost’s influence was partly responsible for this formal discovery, but another reason was Thomas’s critical dissatisfaction with his contemporaries, a dissatisfaction which for many years got him bracketed as an ...”

“... territory. It lies in pockets of Hampstead and Barnes, in Oxford north of St Giles or on Boar’s Hill, where large families live in rambling old houses full of innocent laughter and fun, and favourite aunts and uncles and friends of the family come for lunch on Sunday, and amiable dogs bound about answering to clever names. Mama and Papa are perhaps ...”

“... it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the Peter Greenaway movie to express his amazement. ‘A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye,’ Joan Didion said. She was writing about California, where pools, in her view, were less a symbol of ...”

“... production of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a ...”

“... colourful devotee of focal sepsis was Thomas Chivers Graves, medical superintendent of the Rubery Hill and Hollymoor Asylums in Birmingham, who ‘aggressively treated all the mental patients hospitalised in the Birmingham area along Cotton’s lines’ until after the Second World War. Even Cotton was surprised to discover that Graves extracted his ...”

“... to tell us. It looks as if at one stage he may have had it in mind to engage with Christopher Hill, whose heroic efforts to persuade a sceptical English audience that during the 17th century some kind of Marxist revolution occurred in England, leading to the rise of such things as capitalism and science, will be familiar to all those with any interest in ...”

“... Beardsley’s unfinished literary tour de force, published in expurgated form as ‘Under the Hill’ in the Savoy and in full after his death, presents an extraordinary catalogue of bizarre practices. Its anti-hero, transposed from the Middle Ages to the 18th century as a chevalier or an abbé, enters a grotto deep within the Venusburg, the mons veneris ...”

“... his incinerating ‘every letter he owned not on a business matter’ in a bonfire at his Gad’s Hill garden. What Kaplan ruefully implied by opening with the manuscript holocaust of 1860 was that there was a core of Dickens’s life which we would never know. Dickens laboured tirelessly to make himself publicly famous and at the same time to bury the ...”

“... jolly healthy girls who don’t even read trash, Auerbach is a lone intellectual devouring Hungry Hill by flashlight. Published in 1943, it’s a saga of feudal decay that opens her American eyes to the possibility of another way of ordering the world. ‘I had always assumed that every generation started life over again in a new beginning; I was stricken by ...”