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“... write, read or publish literary criticism, and commit crime. It certainly helps explain why Bevis Hillier has written an enormous biography of a dead English minor poet. John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love is the second volume of Hillier’s proposed trilogy and covers, roughly, the years 1933-58, the period when ...”

“... Victorian architecture, but the verse of Philip Bourke Marston or that of Ebepezer Jones (whom Mr Hillier, by an un-Betjemanian slip, confounds with Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer). In such matters it was good and original pedagogy to be droll. To be so on the subject of the extremely upper classes may seem less useful. They evidently caused him to ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... day-dreams, encouraging by cunning precept the reader’s sense of his own ‘bleak honesty’. Bevis Hillier observed that if Greene had not obstinately retained a tacit obedience to some absolute in Catholic doctrine he would have committed suicide long ago. That seems to me questionable. It is, in a sense, just what the books feel like, and what ...”

“... the military action tend to say so briskly, without enlarging on their reasons. Several, like Bevis Hillier and David Holbrook, fall straight into Mrs Thatcher’s booby-trap of comparison to the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, apparently unaware that the appeasers of Fascism then were precisely those who argued that self-determination was a paramount ...”