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“... mopping up, this book is a crackling performance, livened by fierce comedy and enriched by anger. Denis Hills, the ‘reckless’ author of Tyrants and Mountains, is the man who in 1975 was rescued from Idi Amin’s death squads by Mr James Callaghan, then Foreign Secretary, who flew to Uganda for that purpose. As a serving officer in World War Two and ...”

“... of sardonic, incredulous mirth. In his recent book about modern East Africa, The Rock of the Wind, Denis Hills remarks that ‘colonialist writings’ are often attacked in the Nairobi press – including, to his regret, Out of Africa. One African critic has observed: ‘There is no difference between the works of Shiva Naipaul and the literature of Karen ...”

“... he made friends with two other able autobiographers, David Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking in the magical St Ebbes quarter ...”

“... he felt there, fanned out within the reach of a long arm, stood all the round towers, the green hills, the mountains, the monuments, the little lakes, the little colleens by the lakes, the sea bays, the sea islands, the lake islands, the fiddles, the dancing floors, the shamrocks of the fields, the leaping salmon in the rivers. A warm sea of fancies ...”

“... Authority calls ‘Britain’s scenery’. The word is deadly accurate. The green and rolling hills, the packhorse bridges spanning silver brooks, are theatrical decorations, painted hangings to charm the eye. When people step out from behind the scenery, they are by definition actors, performing a play for the tourists’ entertainment. Britain goes into ...”

“... parts, ‘lovely Sodom’s sin’, a bout of tachycardia, sundry episodes in Brazil, Cuba, Beverly Hills, the Rosebowl at Pasadena, sex abroad. But the occasions that dominate his most telling poems are the old mortalities: in one poem, heartbreakingly, a dead child, in twenty poems or more a dead mother, a dying then dead father. Many of Harrison’s poems ...”

“... after the lines quoted above: When I’m gone, my fame will endure, and while from her seven hills Mars’ Rome in triumph still surveys a conquered world, I shall be read. A major part of his strategy is to reproach the emperor by comparing his treatment with that of Augustus’ long-dead favourites, Virgil and Horace. For most of his career, an ...”

“... to grow tall what proud grace the juniper tree might show that flared, once, like fire along the hills. In their setting in Liberty Tree, these lines are just as ideological as the poem about Desertmartin. The proud grace adorns an epic past and a conjured future: it is the heroic version of the ‘plain Presbyterian grace’ gone sour in ...”

“... the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war correspondent William Walton said to Denis Brian, ‘a man who has spent all his life inventing fiction keeps on inventing it in his private life.’ The reaction started with the publication of Death in the Afternoon in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently expresses it, is not ‘a ...”

“... and Beau Geste, far from fake sheikhery and the coast hotels exploring qasba art in the lunar hills – ‘the best this side of China, I should say’. Of course, most things are different since his day: looking like Katie Tyrrell and the old folks in your own ‘sublimely gloomy’ Athy pix, as everywhere the filmable populations have now been framed in ...”

“... the way furrow weeds do in Shakespeare, as images of disorder. New Zealand becomes a country, in Denis Glover’s Sings Harry, Where all around us ancient ills Devour like blackberry the hills. Blackberry can be seen putting out a shoot on the left of the picture on this page. It also reaches over the fence from the ...”

“... out at the blue enormous bay, its long curving marram strands, its islands and roshans and purple hills with the white quartzy dome of Errigal beyond – we stare out and agree that this must be one of the most beautiful places in the whole world. The moist light moves and zings like a Jack Yeats painting – in a different climate these immense empty strands ...”

“... the publication of this biography, and brought such champions of Wheldon’s reputation as Sir Denis Forman, Ludovic Kennedy and Melvyn Bragg trumpeting into the field. In common with other young men of his generation (he was born in 1916), Wheldon was slow to come to terms with his sexual drive. Sent to stay with a Westphalian family and learn German ...”

“... and no window grieves for lovers turned away, for widows lonely. This is from ‘Deer on the High Hills – A Meditation’, one of Smith’s most exalted poems. These are mostly beautiful poems, elaborately and opulently profiled, but I wish Smith would trust his evidence to mean everything he wants it to mean, without adding italics for emphasis. He ...”

“... features’, and the effect of dawn light (the way the ‘cold grey morning creeps along the hills, and the dark trees stand motionless’), are better conveyed by Layard’s prose than they are by the print, which reduced the fresco to an easel picture. Indeed, Layard himself insisted that Piero’s easel pictures ‘afford but a faint idea of his ...”