“... of translations of Giono into English recently; along with the ones under review here, we have had Hill (NYRB, 2016), Melville (NYRB, 2017) and Occupation Journal (Archipelago, 2020). I’m not sure what this means, but I hope it suggests a new attention to a once famous writer, and all of the books are well worth a first read or a return. The Open Road and ...”

“... The last word of the novel recalls Conrad. The Heart of Darkness is, however, a risky model. As Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now suggest, its invoked presence can leach the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham Greene tells us that in his apprentice days he found The Heart ...”

“... a dizzying but pleasurable succession of meetings with his circle of intimates – Walter Berry, Paul Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust of cosmopolitan Paris.’ Was there no one ...”

“... and it is the latter category which dominates A Word from the Loki. In poems such as Paul Muldoon’s ‘Immram’, Blake Morrison’s ‘Dark Glasses’ and Armitage’s ‘About His Person’, reconstruction allows the reader to feel that he is playing detective. It is one of the dominant models for the contemporary poem – less a set of ...”

“... the scene Her purest of crystal and brightest of green; ’Twas not her soft magic of streamlet or hill, Oh! no – it was something more exquisite still. ’Twas that friends, the belov’d of my bosom, were near, Who made every dear scene of enchantment more dear, And who felt how the best charms of nature improve, When we see them reflected in looks that ...”

“... in which Anglican controversies play out in India; an unfinished draft was later published as The Hill Station (1981). On 11 August, fishing for his supper from a rock, as he’d started doing most afternoons, he was swept into Bantry Bay at the beginning of a storm and drowned, aged 44. This book, J.G. Farrell in His Own Words, a selected letters and diaries ...”

“... wildly from the thunder-cloud … and rush, in far-spread disorder, over the spacious face of the hill’.Some of those spectators – perhaps most of them – hadn’t come to see history made but to pick its pocket. O’Keeffe is at his best when he discusses the ancient and apparently ineradicable urge to plunder the dead. Achilles did it; the Bayeux ...”

“... hamlet of San Terenzo. ‘The sea came up to the door,’ Mary Shelley later wrote. ‘A steep hill sheltered it behind.’ As well as Mary, her husband, their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s ...”

“... had a crush. When he was 25 he had what he called ‘that central experience of my heart’ with Paul Ehrenberg, a student painter and violinist at the Munich Art Academy who more than forty years later became Rudi Schwerdtfeger in Doctor Faustus. Even the boy in Death in Venice was based on a real boy. Katia Mann remembered being on holiday in Venice with ...”

“... of larger farms or sporting estates, and the shifting of undercapitalised peasantry to new lots on hill land or the coast: the policy known as clearance. There were two obstacles to this rationalisation. One was the resistance of the populace. Riots in 1851-2 in Coigach not only stopped the policy of reorganisation then but also, through fear of similar ...”

“... trade at its worst. Even the device of undergirding, or frapping, popularised by the apostle Paul when in trouble off Crete, was still in use – running cables under the keel and tightening them to hold the hull together. The decrepit 74-gun Blenheim was so ‘wretchedly hogged’ that the builders strongly remonstrated against her putting to ...”

“... more like thirty, and I doubt whether any of the governing class that has just taken over Capitol Hill by more constitutional means than those of 6 January is planning to spend time at the Folger.Despite a title that seems intended to provoke right-wing culture warriors, Farah Karim-Cooper’s Great White Bard is in fact a general readers’ guide to the ...”

“... the Colosseum could accommodate Rome’s entire population twice. The palaces on the Palatine Hill were slowly falling apart; the grand ancient churches served congregations a fraction of their former size. What had once been a metropolis of more than a million inhabitants had shrunk to around thirty thousand.All over Europe buildings stood empty. The ...”

“... mountainous and beautiful’), starting early and returning late: ‘we climbed part way up a hill and lay in the grass for a couple of hours in the sun eating candy and talking.’ Eileen had no axe to grind, which made her a rare bird among the expats in Barcelona and may have accounted for her charm in Charles and Lois’s eyes. For all their ...”

“... he turned up as a sports master and odd-job-man at a private crammer in Hampshire called Vicar’s Hill, run by a Mrs Brewer. Then, in 1961, came what can now be seen as his big break. Not for the first or the last time in his life, an older man was seduced by his combination of energy and deference. T.H. (‘Tim’) Cobb, the headmaster of a respectable ...”