“... I often talked about the MacDonalds of Achbuie, Gaelic-speaking Presbyterians who inhabited the hills between Glen Urquhart and Beauly. ‘It was a sad day we left the croft,’ he said (I didn’t tell him that Sad Day We Left the Croft was the title of a Scottish punk compilation from 1981). He could be heavy-hearted when he recalled his father turning ...”

“... a washbasin, an earthenware jug, some tin mugs. The four Dutchmen, Thomas, Johan, Wim and Paul, drank a strange, sluggish beer . . . For a modest fee she would grant them ‘grace and favour’ in her room. One at a time, twenty minutes each. Or else all five of them at once, at a discount. She is, of course, rather more than just a whore. She loves ...”

“... leather! Alas, He, likea thousand white angels who part on the roadis already setting off past the hills! She,all frigid and black, runs! after the man is gone!Polizzotti’s ‘rolled’, ‘stroll’ and ‘knoll’ are very good inventions, but nothing is quite going to catch the jangling irony of the French ‘ombrelle’, ‘ombelle’ and ‘pour ...”

“... rock fields they represent are lost in the inevitable sea-fret, the mist drifting down from the hills.But they have to go, these images. They have to be stacked away in the reserve collection, along with the Fontana, the emulsion-on-hardboard multi-head portraits on which a generation of uncatalogued white moulds are breeding. The manifestos have been ...”

“... or even bed. This, and a not unusual country lad’s liking for night-walking the Gloucestershire hills and river-paths, led to a family reputation for solitariness when in fact, for his time and background, he was astonishingly gregarious. Those walks were often taken in company – they lasted for as many as three days and nights at a time, according to ...”

“... daughters), are what matter to her. The red towers of Sodom are like Housman’s blue remembered hills. But what matters to the reader is that the wife had not only the poet’s impulse but the woman’s: what she sought to make known to herself for the last time was not romance but everyday existence. Having mentioned Housman it is worth recalling his own ...”

“... in sentiment and darkened by the shadow of Ubi sunt? . Unlike the mysteries of tides, caves or hills, these are things the reader knows about, and the assent the poet wins will be too unthinking unless real discovery is enacted by the language. And much of the descriptive writing in Sea to the West is memorably vivid. At one point there is a wildly ...”

“... in a carriage to the caparisoned horse of President Kennedy’s funeral cortège. Figures from Paul Mellon to Siegfried Kracauer, Robespierre to Claude Simon, whose cavalry unit was massacred in World War Two, put in appearances, as do Clever Hans, Comanche (the purported lone survivor of Custer’s Last Stand) and Anna Karenina’s ill-fated ...”

“... and utter meretriciousness, young-man-type showing-off stuff and genuine wisdom, is a bit like Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent film, Magnolia, which shares Coupland’s interest in coincidence and catastrophe and carpe diem. Do we really need or want to be told about life’s beauties and terrors by a couple of smart-arse North American young men? Would ...”

“... detectable before 1914, were suddenly fanned into life. The greatest of the prewar couturiers, Paul Poiret, had predicted that by 1958 women would be wearing trousers. In fact they were wearing them by the 1920s, both literally and figuratively. French couture between the wars was dominated, as never before or since, by female designers: Jeanne ...”

“... them like squeezed-out grapefruit skins. In the course of 24 hours, I might be Nick Adams, Paul Morel, and sitting in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expired of a low dishonest decade; but these were less acts of serious reading than experiments in identity, made by somebody who very much feared that he lacked ...”

“... fuels are producing greenhouse gases and people who don’t want windpower generators on the hills behind where they live. It contains people who won’t wear leather or wool or touch butter or milk and who drink carrot juice because they believe in the ‘natural’. (Carrot juice is sublimely unnatural. No other creature could or would drink it.) It ...”

“... intimations of an English pastoral afterlife. When at the party Glyn Maxwell, or perhaps it was Paul Farley, asked him what it was to be a ‘Caribbean’ poet, he lapsed into silence, the chorus of insects and birds answering on his behalf. The two British poets were putting the questions as I held the microphone and watched the sound levels: the ...”

“... Like many other plutocrats who are now remembered as great collectors, J. Paul Getty began acquiring works of art in a serious way when he began to die – that is to say, in his forties (he was born in 1892), which is when most of us start thinking up ways of not thinking about mortality. He bought glamorous pieces of French furniture and decorative art, a field in which it is relatively easy to buy reliable advice ...”

“... for a book on the topography and history of the Lazio region. He was nearly sixty. Walking in the hills with a friend, he found a ruined church on a mountain. As he explored the ruin, he came upon a marble tablet with the inscription: ‘This is the holy place where St Eustachius was converted to Christianity.’ It also identified the Emperor Constantine as ...”