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“... Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for ...”

“... political activity and lobbying, but was a bad speaker, a reserved, cautious, taciturn man who, John Aubrey noted, ‘had not a generall acquaintance’. He lived in meagre lodgings in central London, and appears to have had a close friendship with Prince Rupert which, according to an early Marvell editor, Thomas Cooke, meant that when it was unsafe for him ...”

“... We were, I later discovered, driving our way through a book I hadn’t read at the time: John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, wherein the author and his dog, Charley, lit out on the back roads of America in the fall of 1960, in a new GM pickup, in order to ‘rediscover this monster land’. Steinbeck is precise and prescient about ...”

“... years by roving groups of content foragers, who must live on the phallic morels they find in the woods. It perhaps contains a tie-in with The Revenant (2015), and an anecdote about the time your mother saw it in the cinema by mistake and texted: ‘The bear did not rape Leo as was reported.’ It perhaps contains a reference to the tame Instagram bear ...”

“... to dramatic invention. By contrast with university-educated rivals like Christopher Marlowe and John Marston, or the erudite autodidact Ben Jonson, Shakespeare owed most of his classical knowledge to his education in a provincial grammar school; but, in spite of Jonson’s condescending reference to his ‘small Latin and less Greek’, Shakespeare was ...”

“... entomology, ornithology, or geology’. Palmer had first met Blake through a common acquaintance, John Linnell, an accomplished and successful artist and probably the most important single influence on the shape of his life. Linnell is the comic monster of the story, a ‘splendid, courageous and manly tyrant’ in Herbert’s view, who would certainly have ...”

“... I looked fat, dull and unmanly. The achievements of others, particularly those of my older brother John, stood in for anything that I might achieve myself, and afterwards a series of distinguished men were to step into John’s shoes. I acquired a spectacular ability to not see, identify or shrewdly evaluate people or ...”

“... and old-fashioned time indicators such as ‘presently’ (lifted, according to his friend John Spurling, from Richard Hughes). And he renders his characters’ inner voices oddly, sometimes putting thoughts in quotation marks, sometimes using free indirect style and sometimes forgetting which of the two he’s doing. From time to time this makes ...”

“... Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be called ‘automatic writings’, it ...”

“... confronted soldiers as they marched in thin lines across open fields or in dense, often burning woods. Three and a half million men were under arms: virtually the entire military-age population of the South and a good proportion of the North as well. Very large armies – sometimes 100,000 to a side – fought scores of deadly pitched battles and hundreds ...”

“... replies: you should read some memoirs. A pity, because his history begins in the days when Sammy Woods could reside as a member of his college for 12 terms, playing rugger and cricket for Cambridge, while failing monotonously to pass the university entrance exam. Edwardian etiquette decreed that if you called on a fellow undergraduate and he was out, you ...”

“... for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves. OK? So they don’t get an idea for a while. They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ...”

“... given order is frozen into a system for decades on end, as at Vienna, Versailles, Yalta or Bretton Woods, but there comes a time when the logic of the system fails to hold. This is pretty much where we are now. In the early Eighties I used to give talks to the middle managers of a major oil company about the changing international environment. It was my custom ...”

“... how the act of lament could itself galvanise the old into something living:Very old are the woods;      And the buds that breakOut of the brier’s boughs,      When March winds wake,So old with their beauty are –      Oh, no man knowsThrough what wild centuries      Roves back the rose.De la Mare tried out ‘roams’, ‘roots’ and ...”

“... the purposes of the conversation; here, it is the ‘grand, otherworldly’ appearance, out of the woods, of a female moose on the moonlit macadam. Here we could say Bishop found the courage to say what she felt deserved commemoration in culture, joining herself implicitly to the line of Thoreau, Audubon and Moore. But where most other observers of nature have ...”