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“... did not visit Wales. When they did so it was a Rubicon he had already crossed, ratified by seeing hills for the first time and sea for the second. His loyalties were separate if indivisible, and decades later he corrected his publisher T.S. Eliot’s reference to him – not Welsh, but ‘a Londoner of Welsh and English descent’. He was encouraged to draw ...”

“... In​ 2011 Paul Kingsnorth announced his withdrawal from the environmental movement after twenty years of activism. Environmentalists, he complained in a long article published in Orion magazine, had stopped caring about the environment: ‘We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called “sustainability”’, which means ‘sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level that the world’s rich people – us – feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so ...”

“... imagine what fun Bunny had’ – as if his job stopped at sourcing the raw material for a story.Paul Thomas Anderson therefore had room to experiment when he adapted the novel for the screen as There Will Be Blood (2007). His protagonist, Daniel Plainview (the role for which Daniel Day-Lewis won his second Oscar), is a much richer and more disturbing ...”

“... hearing a pre-echo of current catastrophes: ‘Summer came swiftly and sweetly over the wooded hills and rich valleys of Northern Croatia. Bridges were down and the rails up on the little single-track railway-line that had once led from Begoy to Zagreb ... In one Mohammedan village the mosque had been burned by Ustachi in the first days of Croatian ...”

“... of the local prison and seventy inmates, some of them due to be hanged that week, escaped to the hills. We were sent to find them. To our relief, we failed to do so, though we managed to lose one of our number, who spent the night wandering in the hills. As the 23rd of Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers were not without ...”

“... rebellion against the Nazi invaders. Our headmaster – how did he get hold of it ? – read us Paul Éluard’s heart-rending poem ‘Liberté’, smuggled across the Channel to the Free French in London. And two very different Resistance memoirs, published in the first year after the war, soon invaded and occupied my adolescent imagination. One was ...”

“... with cavalier inaccuracy and with unselfconscious abandon: Surrey’s domestic architecture. Furzy hills and sandy trails, which had earlier in the century been regarded with distaste by Cobbett (‘villainously ugly’), came to be embellished by ‘a crop of country houses … largely on new sites’. This was not, Ian Nairn insisted, ‘at all typical of ...”

“... Rhodesia (now Zambia); of Nyasaland (now Malawi). He instigated the Jameson Raid to overthrow Paul Kruger’s Boer republic in the Transvaal; he helped to develop the Witwatersrand goldfields; he returned again and again to the idea of setting up a ‘secret society’, which would bring about the domination of the world by ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’. The ...”

“... tone is at the root of Romanticism: ‘Autumn is dark on the mountains; grey mist rests on the hills. The whirlwind is heard on the heath. Dark rolls the river thro’ the narrow plain.’ This voice is evident in Wordsworth, Byron, Emily Brontë and the Ann Radcliffe of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. It can be heard, too, in Walter Scott, who was ...”

“... speeds and high dunes to launch from. He settled on a village called Kitty Hawk, in the Kill Devil Hills, a remote stretch of littoral on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In early September he moved there, and wrote a reassuring letter to his father about the experiments he had planned (‘I think the danger much less than in most athletic games’). Orville ...”

“... Even Pindar, Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have ...”

“... temporal series with the former’. The contradiction is neatly exemplified in the epigraph of Paul Boyer’s book by the hymn ‘When the Roll is Called up Yonder’: When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, And time shall be no more, And the morning breaks eternal bright and fair. If the end of time is unimaginable and the angel cannot bring history ...”

“... on ‘a very extensive view terminated by the sea seen through different openings of the unequal hills’. As her biographers point out, this makes a line that could be straight out of The Prelude: ‘Through different openings of the unequal hills.’ Since William and Dorothy lived in each other’s consciousness at this ...”

“... a dull gold ground on the walls of the churches of Saint Germain-des-Prés and Saint Vincent-de-Paul, works in which the Greek and the Gothic are condensed into an exalted style that may one day be acknowledged as more original than the gross realism of Courbet. In these murals, Flandrin had made an artistic decision that was to have enormous ...”

“... as if for this dionysian release that never came, I thought of the Salt Lake City scholar Paul Shepard’s claim that Yahweh was originally a Semitic storm god. I also felt for the first time something of the beseeching powerlessness of those who prayed to an angry, unpredictable God, and felt how easy it would be to identify that God with the ...”