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“... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...”

“... of the ritual, had he known about it, can only be a matter for speculation, but as recounted by Paul Ferris in Sir Huge the episode quaintly anticipates the row which has broken out over the publication of this biography, and brought such champions of Wheldon’s reputation as Sir Denis Forman, Ludovic Kennedy and Melvyn Bragg trumpeting into the field. In ...”

“... the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Paul de Man see something profoundly representative in Wordsworth’s sudden retreat from the public to the private sphere – the threshold of modernity, the moment when the political and social goals of history become either unrealisable or shallow. When ...”

“... Nous nous aimerons tous et nos enfants riront De la légende noire où pleure un solitaire. Paul Eluard The sort of snailmail that can take a week but suits my method, pre-informatique, I write this from the St Louis, rm 14 – or type it, rather, on the old machine, a portable, that I take when I migrate in ‘the run-up to Christmas’. Here I sit ...”

“... pretty Yorkshirewoman, called Bertha Wharton, who had married a German Jew from Bradford, called Paul Sigismund Nathan, presented here as something of a schlemiel. When Bertha was annoyed with Paul, she called him a ‘fleyboggard’ and then brooded romantically about her ancestry. Michael recalls: ‘A shadowy greatness ...”

“... Eternity the void within me fills And I thought of her left behind me in the Herefordshire hills. I remembered her defencelessness as I made my heart a stone Till she wove her self-protection round and left me on my own. Summoned by Bells, Betjeman’s self-portrait in blank verse, was published in 1960. As Hillier puts it, neatly: ‘John’s ...”

“... twenty years in the South Seas: ‘When you come back, like me, at forty,/it all seems new. These hills will always be waiting.’ The hills are those of the Langhe, a region near Turin where Pavese was born: the poem probes what it might mean for them to seem ‘new’. Are they different? Or unchanged? Is the speaker ...”

“... an economic crisis,’ she said, ‘it’s an existential crisis.’ There is coal beneath the hills of the Costa Verde, and for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, mining and steel production made Asturias one of Spain’s richest regions. The mines have been as vital to popular identity as they are in South Wales, but now only a handful remain and the ...”

“... a girl with a hand-knit tourie. Throughout the boat, muzak was playing. Old Christmas hits. Paul McCartney. The only place you could avoid it was a lounge with subdued lighting and big reclining chairs. There were prints on the walls, a set of three, showing a cartoon sea with a stripy lighthouse, a fishing-boat, and below the blue waves, three ...”

“... Sixties it was (mainly) Georges Poulet. Thereafter – and more controversially – it would be Paul de Man. The Geneva critics taught Miller to conceive of literature not as words on the page, not even as literature, but as ‘consciousness’. At its simplest, phenomenology resurrected the author whom New Criticism had killed. The text could now be known ...”

“... of lyrics and epitaphs who was active in the fifth century BC, and the Jewish Romanian poet Paul Celan. Simonides was an original. His epitaphs, designed to be cut into stone and punctiliously composed according to the width of each letter, were lapidary in the original sense of the word. ‘An inscriptional poet,’ Carson explains, ‘has to measure ...”

“... Cozens, Francis Towne and Samuel Palmer; they made a pilgrimage to Palmer’s Shoreham in 1926. Paul Nash, who taught them at the RCA, described their cohort as ‘an outbreak of talent’ and helped Ravilious and Bawden to find work as engravers, creating bookplates and illustrations for the small presses, especially Curwen. Ravilious was called ‘the ...”

“... been burning, or who or what sparked the blaze. When I asked the then chairman of Ryton Golf Club, Paul Whittaker, how the fire under the course started, he could only tell me when they first became aware of it. Fires underground can be started by spontaneous combustion, if the right elements are present: the mineral pyrite, when combined with oxygen, produces ...”

“... in a grotto and Vita Sackville-West’s gardening boots. All pictures in rather than of gardens. Paul Nash uses a grotto, a swordfish sword, a stone hen and a set of steps to articulate the greenery (which, because his photographs, like Smith’s, are in black and white, is not green at all). While water and sculpture are picked up by painters and ...”