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“... Track approach, Geneva, Paul Nitze and Yuli (Yuri?) Kvitsinsky (Kvitinsky?) and the Walk in the Woods. These are the characters and developments that frame James Buchan’s fourth novel. God knows they seemed vivid enough at the time, and Buchan brings them back with wonderful dash and economy. Political acuity is leavened by a fabulist’s distancing ...”

“... US foreign policy, conceived and delivered in the aftermath of the Cold War. In 1944, at Bretton Woods, the US and its allies had attempted to create something similar, the International Trade Organisation, as the third pillar of an economic system that already included the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The ITO, like so many other ...”

“... but without it life would be meaningless as well. Or so the characters come to suspect. Michael Ahearn, the leading man of Stone’s new novel, Bay of Souls, starts out as one of these worldly protagonists. Quietly dissatisfied, fond of the bottle but sustained by the unexamined vestiges of Catholic faith, he teaches American literature in a sterile ...”

“... system of distance and disappointment, officialdom’s surrender. ‘Like a robber in the woods, the party forces from us sacrifices that we would never have been capable of otherwise . . . And yet we are happy. How suicidal happiness can be!’ All the party has to do is to make his request, the official can only give in. ‘For the ...”

“... concerns a young wandering preacher in 18th-century Pennsylvania. He announces the gospel in the woods, has epileptic fits and visions, is almost killed in a snowstorm and then cared for by a kindly couple; tries to save the life of a young black servant made pregnant by her philanthropic and negro-friendly master – in her case more than friendly. Wideman ...”

“... scraps of sublimity left to us, doesn’t retreat to his literal or figurative cabin in the woods. Readers of his work may be tempted to conclude: this poet doesn’t have a personal life. That’s because what the poems give us are the past fifty years – Joseph’s adult lifetime – in terms of event, public policy and the evolution of ...”

“... out. My life is a long pilgrimage that is always turning on itself, always returning to the woods in the south, to the forest lost in me.’ This sounds like hocus pocus, and the weird, disavowing syntax is suspicious. The regions sink the roots, the roots can’t get out, and the forest gets lost. What is the poet doing all this time? Well, he’s ...”

“... home near Hopewell, New Jersey. Three months after that, the baby was found murdered in nearby woods. In early 1935, at the ‘trial of the century’ at Flemington, New Jersey, Lindbergh took the stand to give evidence against Hauptmann. He committed perjury. Why? Mr Kennedy has a shocking story to tell. The subtitle of his book is ‘The Lindbergh Case ...”

“... is vis-à-vis the German forest? A little lick of helmet-gleam, the deep dark Frostian death-woods. A memory of the retreat from Moscow, or some fresh threat or promise? Some German Birnam Wood? The barrettes (think Wagner) and velvety tunics of some of his humans – you would have to call them deuteragonists – were actually elements of a ...”

“... of a single dog, stolen or purchased, meant a convict could live independent and free in the woods … Without dogs, the bush was a site of probable death, but with them, the grassy woodlands of Van Diemen’s Land became, within two years of settlement, a hospitable refuge.’ The seasoned and sensible David Collins, once the right-hand man of Arthur ...”

“... National Director descending upon the actors rehearsing Horvath’s play, Tales from the Vienna Woods, under the direction of Maximilian Schell: Work on Vienna Woods this morning, and all the company together for Notes at lunchtime. At Max’s invitation I spoke my thoughts to them ... I said that the audience’s ...”

“... of Jonsonian types in the working-out of conundrums in the morality of everyday life. Her hero, Michael Hoath, is the newly appointed vicar of St Hilary’s, a West Country parish. His wife Valentine is beautiful. They are childless. She is no more than decently dutiful in the discharge of her function as the Vicar’s wife, and is aware of the attentions ...”

“... from the roofs, we could hear the galloping approach of spring. We left the snowdrops in the woods alone. We were waiting for May. We were going to pick strawberries.  Already, the woodpeckers were drilling in the trees. It rained frequently. The rains were soft, a velvety water. They might last all day, two days, a week. Not a wind blew, the clouds ...”

“... to the pound – darkness, stone, light, tree, cold. You feel the poet trotting through the woods, jotting something down when the need arises, as for instance: ‘A cuckoo sat hoo-hooing in the birch just north of the house. It was so loud that at first I thought it was an opera singer imitating a cuckoo.’ (They are, someone said, for the most part ...”

“... Places in fiction often have a curious dual nationality. They are entangled in historical events, marked on a solid social map. ‘It’s not exactly the moon I’m asking for,’ a girl thinks in The Dark Hole Days, ‘but surely all my dreams don’t end here: me in a duffle coat signing on the dole and walking in the debris of Belfast.’ Later she adds: ‘Belfast would fit into a corner of London ...”