“... for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through Dumfriesshire, Northumberland or Sussex. Later I would ...”

“... There is a fine, cautious, detailed review of volumes of verse by Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill; there are notes on Ford Madox Ford, Saint-John Perse and many others. And above all there is a beautiful, puzzled essay on Cavafy in which Auden, who firmly believes you need to know his or her language, and perhaps even be a native speaker, to read a poet ...”

“... you thought; whereas just possibly something like Lowell’s ‘a red fox stain covers Blue Hill’ could. One is contrived and synthetic – you can imagine Lowell muttering: ‘I want to get some colour-clash going, and the whole thing is to sound doomy and monosyllabic and Gothic, and I need something to deepen the colour and keep everything from ...”

“... advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter ...”

“... and lighthouse boatman, and his wife Jill told me about life on this coast, ‘the back of the hill’ behind the 2000-foot peaks of Hecla and Beinn Mhor. I had hoped to meet them again this week – I wrote to them in March, but her brother replied from Devon that both had died. We’re steering for Mol a Dheas (‘shingle-beach of the south’) because ...”

“... that the first poem in the book is as simple as it is, asserting that Scafell Pike, ‘the tallest hill in England’, will still be there when its man-made surroundings have ceased to be: No roofs, no town, Maybe no men, But yonder where a lather-rinse of cloud pours down The spiked wall of the sky-line, see, Scafell Pike, Still there. It is ...”

“... precinct in Bootle where they lifted James, and again by the camera of a security firm on Breeze Hill, as they dragged James past – the child clearly in some distress. Watching those boys on camera brought into my head a flurry of pictures from my own boyhood. At that age, we were brimming with nastiness. I grew up on a scheme in the last of Scotland’s ...”

“... at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of tea: ‘Strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ He amuses himself, also, by playing up the hero’s drink problem – Marlowe has to be helped into a taxi, passes out in his clothes, throws up – and having him grouse about his ...”

“... market. When oil was discovered near some vacant lots she had bought on the west slope of Signal Hill, her gamble seemed to have paid off. She clubbed together with the other local owners to discuss a joint sale. Sinclair accompanied her to ‘many disputatious meetings’ and took notes. The greed displayed by some of the owners – who argued that their ...”

“... what it looks like, but the painting makes the imagined Breughel that is the object of pursuit in Michael Frayn’s Headlong seem too obviously an invention, and Goodwin’s portrait of Mehmet an outright sham. There are, however, too many moments when you have to reach for the word ‘inevitably’ as you describe Lowry’s plot. Inevitably, there is a rival ...”

“... made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost his trademark but ...”

“... of personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the ...”

“... of it than some earlier cultures. The introduction of a female-centred pornography with Fanny Hill, the new ‘sex and sensibility’ standards of 18th-century marriage, the decrease in the age of marriage and first intercourse (plus, according to one reading of the demographic evidence, more of the latter performed without matrimonial intentions) over a ...”

“... In 1924 he met Pound there, supposedly – the mythopoeic embellishment – at the top of a local hill. ‘Villon’, his first long poem, was written in 1925, and published, with Pound’s help (one might say, passim), in Poetry five years later. The poem won a $50 prize, which straightaway – that’s hand to mouth – went to pay the expenses incurred by ...”

“... a lock-in after hours, and we’re not home till three that morning. The phone goes early. It’s Michael Keohane, ringing from Sligo, where he’s president of the Yeats Society. We talk, more about the Middle East than Yeats, and he invites us to the opening of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo that Sunday, and to the party afterwards in Lissadell ...”