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“... English, I was struck by a particular sentence: ‘A cream-coloured courser had used to visit this hill, a bird so rare that not more than a dozen have ever been seen in England; but a barbarian rested neither night nor day till he had shot the African truant, and after that event cream-coloured coursers thought fit to enter Egdon no more.’ The ...”

“... one of the most spectacular examples. Pilkington’s description shows that the events in Notting Hill of August-September 1958 were another classic example of a communal riot. A build-up of tension, with attacks (some verbal, some physical) on individual blacks, was followed by the riot itself, and episodes of resistance when the black population fought ...”

“... On 11 November 1990 Geoffrey Hill published a Remembrance Day poem entitled ‘Carnival’, in the Sunday Correspondent. The occasion, and the appearance in a national newspaper, suggested the sort of work that a poet laureate might be expected to produce, although Hill’s acerbic satire on contemporary Britain was most unlike the arch public lyrics that Ted Hughes has published since his elevation to that role ...”

“... obsessed with its own version of English continuity. As Cairns Craig has argued in Cencrastus, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson see class struggle as fundamental to English history, but conceive that history to be ‘shaped as an autonomous inner trajectory defined by the conflicts and the accommodations between classes which do not need to be ...”

“... inch a mandarin’ – and the political scientist Colin Leys. Qualified praise goes to Christopher Hill; there are fond memories of Tariq Ali (who contests one or two details in the memoir). Johnson remembers Hodgkin, a dogged adversary of Pretoria, refusing to sign a petition in favour of anti-apartheid activists who’d torn up the cricket ...”

“... to losing both his legs. He did, however, manage to dictate a last novel – Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982) – before his death in 1983. Since then, Black Sparrow has continued to print and reprint his writings, including novels and short stories unpublished in his lifetime. Two volumes of his letters had appeared by 1991, and the publication of Stephen ...”

“... start talking London pidgin. Not as dense or complex as the codes in The Folks who Live on the Hill, these nonetheless reasonably good noises (‘Hey, how’s me oh pow git-non then?’) always have a Richard-derived moment of drawback in which they can be interpreted. The great scene-saving character is Crispin Radetsky, a bloody-minded and efficient ...”

“... as a supposedly discrete syndrome. The trial of Oscar Wilde is cited, most recently by Christopher Breward, as a turning point after which any deviation in male clothes was seen as simply deviant. Like the French Revolution argument, this is surely only a partial truth. For whatever reason, however, it is true that the average heterosexual ...”

“... A fathead is stupid but a fat cheque is welcome. A fat chance is smaller than a slim chance. Christopher Forth begins his inquiries at the most visceral level, by considering responses to the substance of fat both in and out of the body. It is, he suggests, the capacity of fat to be both in and out that contributes to the widely varying attitudes to ...”

“... to his friend and sometime client of his printing house, the poet and cultural factotum Aaron Hill, that ‘I have bought Mr Pope over so often, and his Dunciad so lately before his last new-vampt one, that I am tir’d of the Extravagance; and wonder every Body else is not.’ Richardson especially resented the poem’s editorial apparatus, sprawling ...”

“... You​ would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill often addressed in his later works ...”

“... Harriet Guest’s starting-point is Donald Davie’s suggestion in 1958 that Christopher Smart might be considered ‘the greatest poet between Pope and Wordsworth’. Her intelligent and carefully argued book does not deliver quite the far-reaching reassessment of Smart’s status Davie must have had in mind. He wanted Smart to be judged over the whole range of his poetic output, both conventional and unconventional, ‘light and ribald as well as devotional, urbane or tender as well as sublime ...”

“... while Russell spent a week at Summerhill in 1927, before opening a school of his own, Beacon Hill, based on similar principles. He was soon disillusioned, however, and left the school after five years. The children in his care, Russell wrote, were ‘sinister’, ‘cruel’, ‘destructive’. The effect of giving them their freedom ‘was to establish ...”

“... I am in Wellington, where I spent my first twenty years. I have walked, as I used to then, down the hill from Wadestown. The pines are now taller and blacker and the glossy mounded foliage of native shrubs covers the banks of cuttings more densely. In those days, after heavy rain, there were landslips. It has been very wet this year but only one yellow patch shows where a few tons of rotten rock and clay slid down to spill over the road ...”

“... upward ‘like a pyramid of fire’, and in Book Five he comes to his royal seat High on a hill, far blazing, as a mount Raised on a mount, with pyramids and towers From diamond quarries hewn. The image of the pyramid associates Satan with ‘impious Pharaoh’, over whose realm – Milton means England – a ‘pitchy cloud’ of locusts are ...”