“... zone’ modelled on Central London’s Georgian squares. The park was dominated by a grass hill, built from the rubble of the tenements and intended to discourage ball games. It recalled Boundary Estate (1900) in Bethnal Green, Britain’s first council estate, with its central green mound fashioned from the miasmic mud and mortar of the rookeries it ...”

“... grape vine. You can see the planting she’s done here in London in front of houses in any hill town in Tuscany. Cheek by jowl, each in a piece of land not more than twenty feet by forty, are wilderness, cultivated informality and disciplined horticulture. All make pictures, two by intention, one through neglect.The desire to make landscape pictures is ...”

“... and Beddoes, together with a handful of 20th-century poets from A.E. Housman to Geoffrey Hill. In Wordsworth we are to attend particularly to line-endings and to prepositions, in Marvell to ‘a particular figure of speech’, in Gower to ‘diction and formulae’. The sophistication of the critic is to be given its full range but the ‘force of ...”

“... have yet to exhaust: the subject of fraud. Fraud involving stamps. Ever since 1840, when Rowland Hill, a simple schoolmaster, was knighted, granted a stipend of some 400,000 marks, and appointed Postmaster General by the British Government in recognition of his invention of the stamp, millions upon millions have been made thanks to that little scrap of ...”

“... mood-changer. Here are two examples, one English and one American, both extremely accomplished. Paul Bailey, with several distinguished novels to his credit already, is a master of this mode. The action of Old Soldiers, the Aristotelian space from the beginning through the middle to the end, occupies only a couple of weeks (and 120 thinly printed ...”

“... the Lord make it like that of New England. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.’ The Puritan separatists were the first to try to realise a dream that recurs like a refrain in American history: what FitzGerald calls ‘starting over’ or rebuilding the world from scratch. Winthrop’s utopian ...”

“... by Sandro Penna, have been thoroughly resettled in English: I have come down from the burning hill to stand by the station’s fresh urinal. The dust and sweat that coat my skin intoxicate me. In my eyes the sun still sings. Body and soul I now abandon to the lucid whiteness of the porcelain. This is beautifully at home: the half rhymes are well judged ...”

“... conservatives as well as liberals at the end of Reagan’s expensive two terms in the White House, Paul Kennedy suggested that like other great powers before it, the United States was dissipating the resources that had made it great. It was in ‘imperial overstretch’. And its political system, like that of Britain earlier in the century, would make the ...”

“... room in Whalley Range’, about iron bridges and ‘a river the colour of lead’. In May 1983, Paul Slattery – who had photographed Joy Division in 1979, too, beside an industrial estate in Stockport – took some shots for Sounds of The Smiths standing in the ruins of Central Station, once the pride of the Midland Railway Company but by then a rackety ...”

“... a middle-aged opposition politician named J.R. Jayewardene, who led a massive protest march on the hill city of Kandy. By an interesting coincidence he is now President of Sri Lanka, and there has been talk of nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize for his part in the recent accord. But crises of this magnitude are not so easily halted and any talk of the ...”

“... Harvard. Slowly, he went crazy, and Doctor Millet was needed again, his asylum now being in Silver Hill, Connecticut. Minty killed himself, in the asylum, in March 1964, hanged himself with a neck-tie. There had been homosexual impulses, and he had said: ‘I’m not sure whether I’m Francis Junior or Francis Senior.’ Stein and Plimpton’s staccato ...”

“... exemplars include Lasdun’s ‘Cluster Block’ at Keeling House in Bethnal Green, and Park Hill in Sheffield, both attempts to recreate the bustle of a working-class street in the air. Aesthetics were secondary, programme was all. The designers of Park Hill, Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, boasted that they didn’t draw a ...”

“... after a visit East. It usually comes as the taxi is about to cross Haight Street, headed up the hill from the Panhandle. I’m not sure why it always hits me at that particular point. The ride in from the airport is sufficiently dreary to provoke such feelings as you head north along the western shore of the Bay with its billboards, warehouses, commercial ...”

“... North-East Canada and his alternation between dependence on home and an urge to hive off. Having Paul Gallico’s Snow Goose read to him at prep school, rediscovering the novella in a hotel when he was convalescing from a major operation in his mid-twenties: these experiences inspired him to follow the snow geese as they made their flight north-eastwards in ...”

“... and accuracy, and huge: it rises from the floor to some feet above your head. Although the hill shading was done by the watercolour painter Paul Sandby, it is not exactly a work of art: one of the few exhibits which qualifies for that description is the map of the siege of La Rochelle engraved by Jacques Callot in ...”