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“... There are​ few contemporary poets as likeable as Michael Longley. That’s not because his poems are simply amiable, but because he looks at things hard and clearly and invites his readers to share his acts of seeing. In his new book, Angel Hill (Cape, £10), even a cataract operation is an opportunity to celebrate sharpness of vision: ‘My eyeball’s frozen ...”

“... from which they want to spend on doing good. But social policy? It is probably unfair to cite Michael Hill’s Understanding Social Policy as an example of why the subject is so likely to produce a yawn. But he manages throughout to reduce subjects of considerable interest to many individuals to a flat, uninteresting, not to say bureaucratic ...”

“... tips of her waders in self-immolation, often keeping at it well into the night? Celine Dion, Cher, Michael Bolton, Faith Hill, Toni Braxton – knocking you back one after another, all morning and afternoon, at least until the men arrive after work. I don’t know why. Perhaps it has to do with the ‘emotional nature’ of ...”

“... Geoffrey Hill’s second collection of poems, King Log, was published in 1968, that year of student radicalism and disappointment. Hill’s title is reactionary in its implications and derives from Aesop’s fable of the frogs who desired a king. In my edition of L’Estrange’s royalist version of Aesop the fable runs like this: The Frogs, living an easy, free life everywhere among the lakes and ponds, assembled together, one day, in a very tumultuous manner, and petitioned Jupiter to let them have a King ...”

“... Power House, or to cars sweeping their shadows from lamp-post to lamp-post down Haverstock Hill or to brewer’s drays or to lighthouses and searchlights or to a newly cut lawn or to a hot towel or a friction at the barber’s or to Moran’s two classic tries at Twickenham in 1937 or to the smell of dusting-powder in a warm bathroom or to the fun of ...”

“... the unimaginable – The frame of a motorbike (and a side-car’s) Hidden by snow and heather up a hill Near Ullapool, a twenties Blackburn of course, Skeleton recognising skull, and soul A monkey’s soul amalgamated with ...”

“... murdering and dismembering six lonely young men at that dreaded address, Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, Dennis Nilsen must have basked in the thought that, even behind bars, he was still free to roam through the darker corners of the minds of all those people who had scorned or ignored him when he was a Job Centre counsellor and a pub bore. The man has ...”

“... peers are elected by the whole house. The candidates’ mini-manifestos persist: ‘I have owned a hill farm in Cumbria for 34 years and understand the problems of hill farming’ (Earl of Carlisle, Lib Dem); ‘I run an equestrian/activity centre and am an international show-jumping judge’ (Lord ...”

“... deserved. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, generally known to the world as Fanny Hill, bases itself on a female sharing of emotions – more fictitiously, but not more factitiously, than ‘Men’. Each of the two sections of the book, which were published some four months apart in 1748 and 1749, is a letter from Fanny to an unnamed female ...”

“... London in my hands, I spent a long time pondering the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury ...”

“... How near you are, immortality – in the wings of bats, in pairs of headlights nosing down the hill Lvov 1. City on however many hills. A grizzled yellow. It gives you a memory of bells to take with you, audible in the jingle of your dog-tag. 2. Slopes, like fears, too many to count. The tramline ends in front of peeling doors in a prairie of ...”

“... father pushing from the side, and with the horse tethered behind. They slowly reach the top of the hill at the back of the screen and disappear over it. We look for a long time at the empty landscape. Then father, daughter, cart and horse return, trundle back down the hill, unpack and settle into the house again. What ...”

“... races vainly after it. Then he has an idea. He can outwit the bike by taking a short cut over a hill, the bike will have to follow the road round. Yes, he is going to make it, he scrambles down the other side of the hill, the bike is approaching. No, there is a ditch between the ...”

“... earlier – that is, about two seconds later – two children, Na Young and Hae Sung, climb a hill on the outskirts of Seoul. They have just left school and Na Young is crying because Hae Sung has, for once, got better marks than she did. He says she’s a psycho, which is apparently meant as a compliment, or at least to be funny. We then see the children ...”

“... book did not make the national news. Country Life, however, managed that feat when, as Michael Neill discussed in the last issue of the LRB, it devoted its May issue to the horticulturalist Mark Griffiths’s contention that the title page of John Gerard’s Herball of 1598 contained a portrait of Shakespeare. This led to headline variations on the ...”