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“... 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 ...”

“... next attempt at marriage was foolhardy, for in Chapter 9 she reveals: ‘I Married a Satirist.’ Christopher Booker, her second husband, enables her to be part of the satire boom, and its ‘sudden, unblinking stare at reality’. Private Eye, Christine Keeler, That Was the Week that Was all duly happen, but Tennant is not, as she imagines, ‘by proxy a ...”

“... themselves than as furnishing the perfect polemical points de repère; over the years the poems of Christopher Middleton, of J.H. Prynne, and of C.H. Sisson, have all found themselves not so much constituting the grounds of Davie’s argument as figuring in it. But Milosz is too stubborn and faceted to be functionalised, even in the most high-minded way, and ...”

“... Geoffrey Hill the poet is often washing his hands. Sensuous but deeply penitential, his poetry visits waves of scruple upon itself. No contemporary poet has a more contrite ear for the confessions, and the betrayals, of words. Of course, much great poetry has not worn this bent gesture, nor do we always want it to, and it can be irritating when Hill’s more pious admirers speak as if verse’s highest theme should be not the intolerable wrestle with words, but, as it were, a further wrestle with the wrestle ...”

“... belonging in The Naked Gun: ‘What I knew about Peterson, dead or alive, amounted to a very small hill of beans – in fact, it wasn’t even that; there was no hill, and the few beans I had were dry and tasteless … Hendricks was watching me … I guess he was counting his beans, too.’ Along with non-Chandlerian ...”

“... on the moon … All the possible futures depended on a starting point in the present.’ Golden Hill, his first straight-up novel, is set in mid-18th-century New York, and the setting functions as another of these starting points. The reader isn’t so much encouraged to gawp at the contrast between the provincial entrepôt and the future megalopolis as ...”

“... threw that group into crisis and most of Hobsbawm’s fellow-travellers (E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill) left the party then or soon afterwards. Hobsbawm did not, concluding that the Soviet invasion, however agonising, was a necessary step in light of the danger of counter-revolution: ‘If we had been in the position of the Soviet ...”

“... should not calumniate the unnamed, or incite parlour-game guesswork about poetry. (Is it Geoffrey Hill? Fifteen sonnets doesn’t fit, though there would be something boldly winsome about offering Hill as your example of the poet insufficiently dedicated to his art.) Even more important, there is the assertive naivety which ...”

“... paying his assistant staff) were somewhere between £10,000 and £12,000 – making him, as Christopher Tyerman calculates, ‘the equivalent of a modern millionaire’. In 1859 he might have expected to move on to the mastership of an Oxbridge college (the fellows of Trinity, Cambridge are said to have been already trembling at the uncomfortable ...”

“... all – his pay went up to £312,000. Slough Estates’ remuneration committee was chaired by Sir Christopher Harding, chairman of BET, whose own remuneration committee brought him up to £540,000. Sir Christopher is now chairman of the remuneration committee at GEC, which recently decided on a remuneration package for a ...”

“... he enthuses to Victoria Lambert as she joins him for a session with Pilates guru Dreas Reyneke. Christopher Isherwood was a devotee of the exercise technique, devised by Joseph Pilates in the 1930s, so it has a strong literary pedigree. The ‘52-year-old writer’ – that’s Amis – ‘has been attending Reyneke’s Notting ...”

“... and their book will be heavily quarried by quizmasters until the BBC itself goes the way of Snow Hill and (nearly) Marylebone. (‘What is the connection between Lordship Lane, Dulwich and Railway Cuttings, Acton?’ ‘Camille Pissarro painted the first, Lucien Pissarro the second.’) They cite no fewer than 99 films, from Jean Renoir’s version of ...”

“... remembered my name without making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he ...”

“... not be going down to the city?’ the man asked suddenly. He had joined me as I was climbing the hill, and his curiosity had not been satisfied. ‘How long do you stay in Damascus?’ ‘I don’t know. Several months.’ ‘Wullah! What would one do in Damascus for months? What is wrong with New York?’ (A foreigner is always an American ...”

“... world of Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers and millenarian preachers which E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill describe in their work. For Thompson, Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the two ‘founding texts of the English working-class movement’ (the other is The Rights of Man). And so to admire Bunyan is by definition to be a dissenting radical, a ...”