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“... Writing​ to his friend Stephen Bann, then a graduate student, in 1964, Ian Hamilton Finlay outlined his plans to treat readers of his brash new journal, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, to a free lollipop, sellotaped to the magazine’s cover. Like many of his plans from this period it came to nothing. In any case, sugar and spice weren’t really Finlay’s thing ...”

“... came to England, the Punch illustrators and others whose work had been reproduced as wood engravings went on working in line, or turned to watercolour but rarely to oil. Rockwell, particularly in later years, rummaged in the graphic toolbox for whatever was handy. If a photograph was a quicker way to record a pose, if painting over it gave you ...”

“... Government and who have infiltrated the Zionist networks: Jan Zimmer, a Polish immigrant, and Ian Fotheringill, a Scottish chef and former SAS member. Lucas discovers this menace almost too late, and is nearly killed. The novel ends in a thrillerish shoot-out along underground tunnels. When it is all over, Lucas flies back to New York, clearer-eyed about ...”

“... translated into English four times in one year: in 1991, by Margaret Jull Costa, Alfred MacAdam, Ian Watson and Richard Zenith. The last of these texts started out as The Book of Disquietude, but the longer word was soon dropped. As Jull Costa says, desassossego can be rendered as ‘unease/disquiet/unrest/turmoil/anxiety’. The prefix ‘desas’ means ...”

“... of porridge of mixed grains as a school lunch. There is a rota for the children to bring sticks of wood to cook the porridge, for there is no wood in the village: this is the peña. Families collect dead bromeliads from the jungle to use for cooking fuel – these are epiphytes, plants that live in trees, abundantly. (Some ...”

“... General Secretary would not lack – and might need – allies in clearing out more of the dead wood. If so, Gorbachev’s personal authority may prove to have been greatest during the initial clear-out period, and it is at least possible that he will now become increasingly dependent on the collective leadership of his newly promoted allies: Yegor ...”

“... with polystyrene tiles, floorboards with lino and wall-to-wall foam-backed rugs. Every inch of wood was treated and primed and slapped with coat after coat of shock-resistant, blindingly shiny gloss. After so many layers, it’s hard to get back to the true grain. The metaphors resound, and the sentences ring: ‘Winkie’s breath always smelt of ...”

“... all about class war, and ‘the ecological threats inherent in fragmenting native habitats’; ‘wood is a metaphor for capitalist plunderers while adobe represents a socialist utopia where tenant farmers own land’; ‘it’s almost as if Guthrie had written House of Earth prophetically, with global warming in mind.’ They make it sound like Silent ...”

“... which we have many fine Greek and Latin examples, we choose to think of it as having started when Ian Watt said it did in The Rise of the Novel. Since Watt’s book is among the handful of postwar critical books that can comfortably be called classics of a genre that boasts very few, one sees that Doody is aiming high. She scornfully rejects the notion that ...”

“... suspicion persisted. Sharp little verses – by Thom Gunn and John Coleman – were flighted; and Ian Hamilton capped it all with a brilliant and damaging New Yorker profile. Stephen grew used to being abused. He abused himself. He could seem generous and long-suffering, but could hardly be blamed for resenting a few of the more vocal of the new generation of ...”

“... an exceptional narrative craftsman, adept at dangling sinister, wormy facts (in this he resembles Ian McEwan, a writer temperamentally close). George tells us, eventually, that he was pushed out of his job as a detective for over-zealous interviewing procedures, that he is divorced, and that his daughter has recently come out to him as a lesbian. If the novel ...”

“... of Kathy Acker for the Guardian; she had been holidaying in Val d’Orcia with her newish husband, Ian Patterson, the Cambridge academic and poet who was Jenny Diski’s husband until her death in April 2016; she was tweeting about Sam Shepard and Brexit and the Booker shortlist and a new Laure Prouvost show and Charlie Gard and Call Me by Your Name and cab ...”

“... came to be embellished by ‘a crop of country houses … largely on new sites’. This was not, Ian Nairn insisted, ‘at all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say that again, Mush.Fifty years after Harris and a few years after the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, the battle of the ...”

“... compound that forms the cell walls in plants. Lots of substances can be used to make paper: linen, wood, bark, grass, cotton, silk, rice, straw, hemp, bamboo, rattan, seaweed. For many pre-machine centuries the process went as follows. Cellulose is released by breaking down the raw material, then beating it with water to produce a blend of about 2 per cent ...”

“... a need to publicise. In Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992), Ian Hamilton quotes Brooke’s Rugby and Cambridge friend Geoffrey Keynes on the underlying causes of the Eddie-Ranee stand-off: Brooke’s unmanly physical beauty was often taken as an indication that he was probably a homosexual … It had, of course, been far ...”