Well, *I* think that _De Jure Belli Ac Pacis_, his sequence about
Hans-Bernd von Haeften in _Canaan_, is one of the best things he's
written. And that there are other things in Canaan which must rank among
the worst - "let not this fall imputed to our native obdurate
credulities", and all that crud. A typical Hill cadence, especially of
late, has been the piling up of adjectives so as to give the concluding
noun a sort of definitively-cumbersome lexical _gravitas_ (like that:
and especially if the noun is Latin: and all the better if there's a
hyphen there somewhere). Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
Interesting (to put it vaguely) that both Hill and Harrison have in
later years been accused of losing their distinctive music, of becoming
cloth-eared and being overpowered by their own mannerisms. All
scholarship boys wind up as wincing self-parodies sentimentalising a
lost authenticity, as any fule kno.
- Dom
Douglas Clark wrote:
>
> Although I should add that `The Charity....' is not far behind these.
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