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“... beginning where an idle mind spools out to borderline and limit half a mile of shadow in the pine woods or a rim of wetland – rush and willow gathered close like mourners in the dark – a sudden ambiguity of liverwort or birch suggesting no man’s land or journey’s end. As everything is given and conceived imagined real a stone’s throw in the mind ...”

“... from the coppice stool after being pushed over by mammoths in the last interglacial? How do our woods, and the ways we have used them, compare with woods in other countries, for example in Japan? The largest and oldest wooden buildings in the world are in the complexes of ancient Japanese temples around Nara. Rackham is ...”

“... trim on the outside, feigning the sense of proportion that the contents had no time for. John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance was a proper doorstop, and so was L.H. Myers’s The Near and the Far, which I read in New Orleans in 1980, mainly in a hippyish French Quarter teahouse called Until Waiting Fills (a line from Robert Heinlein’s ...”

“... conscious of its literary co-ordinates, and this story falls squarely into the macabre area of John Burnside’s work. It is queerly echoed, for instance, by the conclusion of his prose-poem ‘Aphasia in Childhood’, which deals, in part, with exploring woods as a boy: ‘I was sure, if I dug a few inches deeper, I ...”

“... in a net I seek to hold the wind. Ode to Hypnos Here is the angel of slumber, come from the woods to press a bloody talon to the glass; the erstwhile abolitionist of mardi gras, pure stranger to himself, he fabricates this ersatz Eden, trading bishoprics of light for milk and honey, words in Aramaic, a Weihnachtsmarkt of diet pills and Lauds. Here is ...”

“... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...”

“... no one to watch it, this sea breeze releases me to the cloud of knowing. There are beaters in the woods, nourishing it, and you’re it, reciting it. The long scramble upstairs landed us here. There is no method in the alphabet; the urchin came unseated. You have to learn to ‘bounce’ with the ages, just to keep up with time. By then it will have been ...”

“... brought against her grandmother, Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, by the two schoolmistresses. Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie claimed that, acting on the word of her granddaughter, Dame Helen had brought about the ruin of their school and their reputations: she had withdrawn Jane Cumming from the school and caused the other pupils to be removed; she had not given ...”

“... perhaps. Yet no mood will be shattered if we are diplomatic, for once. The inheritors of those woods and groves won’t oppress us, and there’ll be a chance for sleep and some grub. You’ll see. Lost Profile I had a voice once, braid falling over the front of my forehead-house and down the sides. No need for cream separators here someone said. My guide ...”

“... money); but now, for a season, they fly low over the fields and the thin paths that run to the woods at Gillingshill, the children calling out on Sunday walks to stop and look                      and all of us pausing to turn in our tracks while the mortgaged land falls silent for miles around, the village below us empty and grey as ...”

“... SCENE: Sunday. England. Country road. CAST: deer Jimi Hendrix limo driver [Enter deer from woods on right. Stops, stands still on road] DEER: Heart is wild muscle Hum [Limo with JH in back approaches on road. JH on cell phone] JH: So. Dad. I’m in England. LD: Look we got a deer. JH: What? LD: There. JH: Just standing ...”

“... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...”

“... Dying There are those who say we can choose, when the moment comes: a shape stealing home from the woods, a loping fox, or the smallest of birds, come in through an open window – firecrest, or wren – a flutter against the wall, or a ribbon of music; and, sometimes, a friend or a lover, twenty years on, the old hurts dissolved; ambivalence forgotten. Me, I ...”

“... Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,’ John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge ...”

“... out as part of the pain of the earth’. In a chapter entitled ‘The Pink Triangle’, Gregory Woods writes: After the ‘liberation’ of the camps by the Allies, those survivors who wore the pink triangle – denoting that they had been imprisoned as homosexuals – were treated as common criminals who had deserved their in-carceration. Many were ...”