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“... were indications, sounds and airs, that the black magic of the Mafia was known to the island. Paul Castellano was a Staten Island householder who can rarely have set foot on the ferry and who was eventually to stay at home, save for the occasional progress by limousine across the bridge. The mansion he lived in, nicknamed the White House, stood on top of ...”

“... road is a no man’s land on the edge of society,’ Rupert Martin wrote in 1983, introducing Paul Graham’s photo­graphs of the A1, ‘and its inhabitants – the staff of cafés or hotels, the lorry drivers, salesmen and others who ply the road – are often imbued with a solitary stoicism, a kind of self-sufficient melancholy.’ There are those for ...”

“... had ever handled an explosive. ‘I’ve never touched a bomb in my life,’ one of them, Paddy Hill, has said. There is now nothing to contradict him. There are signs that the authorities have since recognised the weakness of the Greiss tests. Poor Dr Skuse, the Home Office scientist who carried out the tests, was retired early, at the age of 50, only ...”

“... a meditation on the persistence of the unremarkable life: ‘No wonder the poor farmer of the hill did not despise the rush, did not see it, as I saw it, as his enemy. For he saw nothing as his enemy, not rush, or dock, or thistle, or nettle, or any weed, and not the foxes either and the swarming rabbits that I so hated, but saw all things as part of an ...”

“... car manufacturers. He was also the author of a novel, Man in White (1986), about the life of St Paul, with whom he liked to compare himself: ‘Also interesting, for me at least,’ he writes in Cash (1997), ‘were the parallels between Paul and myself. He went out to conquer the world in the name of Jesus Christ; we in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Goa?The problem of articulation is present in the work of other émigré artists, in the Paul Klee-like paintings of Anwar Jalal Shemza and in the work of Avinash Chandra, both of whom moved to London in 1956 (from Pakistan and India respectively), but it is also a problem of postwar art-making as a whole. In Germany the dilemma was existential: how ...”

“... as an accountant among the big names of the City (Barings, Ansbacher, Singer and Friedlander, Hill Samuel) had prepared him perfectly for his chairmanship of Astra, a burgeoning, middle-ranking arms and explosives company which he had built up since 1981 with the help of the directors of a Scottish fireworks ...”

“... surrounded by hills covered in dense forests of casuarina trees. The beach is half a mile down the hill, and if the day is sunny, which it usually is, after lunch I set up my folding chair under the palms and continue to write. When I’m done, I go for a swim. I feel lucky to have lived a life with the whole day to myself. In the evening, I usually make ...”

“... Paul Nash​ is as close as we come, many think, to having a strong painter of the English landscape in the 20th century. The uncertainties built into the wording here are part of the point: Nash spent his working life trying to decide if ‘the English landscape’ was something that had an existence, as a value for art, beyond, say, 1918; and what the difference was, in landscape painting, between strength and histrionics; and whether remaining ‘a painter of the English landscape’, with all that followed in terms of a settling of accounts with Constable and Turner, and Blake and Palmer, and Crome and the watercolourists and Ford Madox Brown, was at all compatible with being a painter ‘in the 20th century ...”

“... Paul Lafargue drove Engels to despair. Negotiating with other French socialists over the founding of the Parti Ouvrier Français in 1881, he committed ‘blunder after blunder’ and nearly wrecked the whole thing. In 1889, charged with organising the founding conference of the Second International in Paris, he was making ‘a terrible hash of things ...”

“... from Ellis Island – as Stratoberdha. My father believes the name means ‘military camp on the hill’; no one has spoken Albanian in my family since Elias’s generation. In A Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology and Folk Culture I found a reference to an Orthodox village of that name, one of five in the vicinity of Korçë where those who suffer ...”

“... of lost momentum. St Andrew’s was a dramatic ruin: the great tracts of cleared land around St Paul’s and the Barbican were simply signs of stagnation. Elsewhere ‘vast opportunities’ had already been squandered in Pevsner’s view on banal and timid architecture. Production of The Buildings of England itself had been suspended for three years. Allen ...”

“... Christopher Hill has shown literary critics the way before now. Many must have felt at least mildly chastened by his remarks in Milton and the English Revolution (1977), no less forceful for their studied moderation, on remembering the effects on Paradise Lost of censorship, fear, a social context in which men were hanged for expressing Miltonic opinions and judges expressed regret at not being able to order sentences of death by burning ...”

“... to a woman who pursues men in a spirit of adventure, because she is afraid of them. Down from the Hill is another novel about discontented middle-aged reminiscence. The narrator of the first section is a 17-year-old factory worker from Nottingham describing a long bicycle ride through the Midlands, 250 miles, stopping at a Youth Hostel and a bed-and-breakfast ...”