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“... None in this genre is as good as Ogden Nash’s ‘Termite’. Some primal termite knocked on wood And tasted it, and found it good; And that is why your Cousin May Fell through the parlour floor today. (Included in Watts but not in Logue.) It has the calm acceptance of fatality that is the essential of a Ruthless Rhyme, but the added parody of a ...”

“... him ‘Sylva’, so closely did they identify him with his famous book. Describing himself as ‘Wood-born’, he was the ideal author for the Royal Society’s first official publication. Although it started life as a report to the naval authorities on the state of the nation’s timber, he turned it into a paean to trees, offering advice on every aspect of ...”

“... it was (and is) a wonderful grandstand. The land feels eager to be eroded all over New Zealand. Charles Andrew Cotton, a local pioneer of geomorphology could illustrate most generalities of what erosion does to landforms with native examples. All my New Zealand years I lived at 13 Pitt Street with my parents and sisters. (As you walk down, the odd numbers ...”

“... of ‘forensic botany’. One of the earliest is the Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932, where the wood grain in remnants of the homemade wooden ladder used to abduct the twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr was compared with that of floorboards in the suspect’s attic. Another, from the 1980s, is a murder case in which ...”

“... of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy ...”

“... on a drawing made at the morgue, shows the founder of the German Communist Party already turned to wood: as the two ploughmen dig their graves, so Liebknecht merges with his coffin. He becomes an altar for the mourners who hover over him.Kollwitz modelled this image on the dead Christ, a recurrent theme among old German masters such as Holbein and Dürer, and ...”

“... Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with ...”

“... the words were ‘insufferable’ and enters into a warm and indeed emotional friendship with Charles Summers: but the remark gives the general tone. He is soon known as Lord Talbot. Among the remainder of the passengers there is a dissolute old painter called Brocklebank and his alleged wife and daughter, a waning theatrical beauty with whom Talbot has a ...”

“... a commodity broker. But then he arranged new vacuum-cleaners in a perspex case and sold them to Charles Saatchi. ‘It is my belief,’ announces Januszczac, that art today is largely in the business of supplying frisson, little niblets of existential uncertainty, ways of not-knowing, mysteries, small after-hours pleasures for overworked urban minds ...”

“... but, like it or not, the audience for the increasingly complex improvisations of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman was his audience too.Shankar’s​ popularity was such that he was able to fill the Royal Festival Hall in 1958. The next time he played there was in October 1963. That same evening, across the Thames at the London ...”

“... laid out, in a serpentine river, pieces of water, lawns, &c, and very gracefully adorn’d with wood. One first comes to an island in which there is a castle, then near the water is a gateway, with a tower on each side, and passing between two waters there is a fine cascade from one to the other, a thatch’d house, a round pavilion on a mount, [and] Shake ...”

“... as Lucas points out, has produced a flourishing literature of poems about arguments about wood – ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, but see also Harley MS 2253, ‘the wodeward waiteth us wo that loketh under rys’ – as of poems about enclosures and deserted villages and customary rights, or poems about felled poplars (Cowper), fallen elms ...”

“... a large wooden object in the shape of a spindle. Our young guide explained this was made of olive wood which, if the pilgrim could only grasp it, would assure her of a place in heaven. If she could not, she was consigned to hell. I didn’t want to see the outcome of this epic struggle: the woman’s wrist and the span of her palm looked so unequal to the ...”

“... until the miraculous happens’. Here’s a crowd of metaphors – walking, talking, working wood, working miracles – and in the middle of it a technical term (‘cadence’) immediately caught up into a poetic reflection of the subject (‘a cadence or a tenderness’). The whole thing should sound a bit woozy but is somehow exact. It is a risky ...”

“... of the term ‘Elves’, as also for his shabby dealing with the splendid notion of Great Birnam wood advancing upon high Dunsinane hill. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature admits with some complacency to ‘not being specially well read in modern English’ and to ‘no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English ...”