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“... his eye could reach Fair structures, rain bow-hued, arose; And rich pavilions thro’ the opening woods Gleamed from their waving curtains sunny gold; And winding thro’ the verdant vale Flowed streams of liquid light; And fluted cypresses reared up Their living obelisks Such enchanted topographies are further glimpses of the Susquehannah life that never ...”

“... sketches of her personal past, and historical events such as the Shoah, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the perpetual alert of B-52s in the American prairie, or the Kyoto Accords. Still, her most shocking alteration of former habits occurred in Swarm (2000), in which her sentences disintegrated utterly. Her chief thematic preoccupation in Swarm is ...”

“... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...”

“... then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in.That is what John Masefield called ODTAA, an acronym for ‘one damn thing after another’, and the title of his 1926 novel, which really does what it says on the tin. It’s a long tale of futile adventures in the jungle, ‘event after event’, as Masefield says, which ...”

“... abuse and drugs. However, in November, the children had attended a Halloween party in Hamsterly Woods. The adults dressed up, and one of the party, called ‘Witch Smeg’, is said to have looked like one of the defendants. The first child to talk about ritual elements in the alleged abuse by adults said that they were ‘like Halloween’. As time went on ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... with becoming a plumber or hairdresser or sushi chef. It would support a view of authorship like John Gregory Dunne’s, who described writing for a living as ‘a job, like laying pipe’.Imitating Authors describes two developments over the past three centuries that helped imitation lose its old sense and take a pejorative turn. The first is the ...”

“... Official-Secrets-Act government establishments is that they are very good for wildlife. Thick woods, screening concrete bunkers and hunchbacked huts from the eyes of the curious, provide an excellent habitat for shy fauna, for monkjacks. During a period when sheep and pigs and cows, all the nursery favourites, were being taken out by snipers and bulldozed ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”

“... way he and Lynch composed Laura Palmer’s theme for Twin Peaks (‘OK, Angelo, we’re in a dark woods now, and there’s a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees’) that is the closest you’ll get to crawling inside Lynch’s head. The idea of a literary Lynch is more curious. By his own admission, he was not a big reader and his aversion to ...”

“... fear of retaliation. Fairies may have been more at risk from scholars such as Robert Burton and John Aubrey, who sought to identify them with the classical godlings. Aubrey claimed that Robin Goodfellow was simply the god Faunus in disguise. Burton defined fairies as ‘terrestrial devils’ in The Anatomy of Melancholy, grouping them with the Greco-Roman ...”

“... are real cave things: they were before words were. Like the strongbox, or the dark house, or the woods, the cave of the mouth is another of those Frostian dark places both cherished and feared – sometimes a shelter and sometimes a place from which one must emerge. Edward Thomas appreciatively remarked that North of Boston contained language ‘more ...”

“... The plagues progress to human sacrifice: an extreme death-metal band is found murdered in the woods in what appears to be a ritual killing. The sexy journalist, Jostein, races to the crime scene with his tip still wet from last night’s hook-up: ‘The three lads were lying on their stomachs, their heads wrenched back, facing the wrong way, it was like ...”

“... after the last four years’; ‘Heavens, what a vale of tears it is’; ‘Oh heavens, now John Ashbery and I have to go and have an “intimate” lunch with Ivar Ivask.’) In 1973 she wrote to James Merrill: ‘I could weep myself to think of Mr [Chester] Kallman’s weeping over “The Moose”.’ There is no explanation as to how she learned that ...”

“... and it’s still too early to say which, if any, have a reasonable chance of leading us out of the woods (or rather the desert, or the floodplain). The facts, rehearsed so often, for so long and to so little effect, nonetheless bear repeating. The greenhouse effect was first hypothesised in 1824 by Joseph Fourier – though his analogy was the bell jar rather ...”