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“... all sevens. Knowing Thomas had saved the day to give me California Sunshine on. The world in the woods was unscaled. We shed our clothes, a pale stripling and a limber one. Purple foxgloves clung like flies’ tongues in the red clay banks. Dun calves grazed the greenleaf in the sun and looked on. My balls were like pink sea-urchins in the cold ...”

“... sum of my parts I’m waiting for the limbo of a life that goes without saying: a circle in the woods of mint and coal where someone has stopped before now to light a fire                      – almost but not quite right: illusion                like the one who stays at home lost in the warmth of butter and cherry ...”

“... Though she is capable of more, these are the two modes alternating in her latest book, Woods etc. In her second collection, Dart (2002), Oswald sought not to describe water with words but to make water out of them. A brilliantly mapped-out and achieved piece, Dart was like a contemporary ‘Brook’: the great river epic Coleridge didn’t in the ...”

“... heart of matter. IV What We Know of Houses Sunday.            We are driving to the woods to find the hidden origin of rain: a shallow basin carved into the rock where Pictish chiefs assembled with their kin to reinvent the world                                – or so we say – though no one knows for sure who ...”

“... value as an autobiography, or as giving the whole story. Regard it as pointing a way out of the woods that may only take us deeper into them. It provides lyrics, no matter that Sondheim admits to enjoying the music more. As any admirer knows, his gift is the unmatched dance of music and lyrics, the nearly stammered wordsmith skill that he calls ordinary ...”

“... a building supplies store, and who now, a widower, a retired man, lives in a small house in the woods. Mike speaks in the dogged clichés of the age: his father ‘never disrespected me . . . was always there for me’. Sometimes it is the inarticulacy of others that opens the gap to an uprush of feeling. The writer’s wishful thoughts, his own ...”

“... acquaintance, as Emerson described it in Nature: ‘The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable,’ he wrote. ‘I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.’ The Babcock Gallery, founded in 1852, is the oldest gallery in New York, and has made a ...”

“... some of the women believed it must be a power thing. A few knew him as Peter, others as Craig or John. One woman had him in her phone as Blue Van Man. Shown ranks of photographs by detectives, however, the women all pointed to the same man. His name was Iain Packer. He knew Emma, they told the police. He’d had sex with her regularly, at least once by ...”

“... that wallet at his back, while we who think we know where we are going unfazed end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know by the unexpectedness of ice and stars and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it, a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down into this ...”

“... so he acquaints himself with this ‘testicular view’. One story in particular strikes him: John Cheever’s ‘The Country Husband’. The force of it disorients him, he realises, because in twenty sad, brilliant pages it demolishes the allure of the things for which he most longs: ‘husbandhood and fatherhood and a certain kind of woman who attached ...”

“... Guards in the Great War. He was shaken and humbled, as the British Empire was to be. When his son John, aged barely 17, was rejected by the Navy because of poor eyesight, he wanted to go off and enlist in the ranks, but his father used his friendship with Lord Roberts to get him a commission in the Irish Guards. He disappeared the following year in the Battle ...”

“... Shakespeare’s Timon abandons labour, profit and society, and lives like a wild man in the woods. He finds gold when digging for roots. As Russell Beale said while rehearsing the play, this is ‘a cosmic joke, like an alcoholic being offered a drink’. Timon cannot stop himself giving the gold away, any more than he can stop the parasites who visited ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the anonymous Gems of Deportment (1880) and Things that Are Not Done by Edgar and Diana Woods (1937). In 1860, The Perfect Gentleman, the work of ‘a Gentleman’, suggested: ‘Do not praise bad wine, for it will persuade those who are judges that you are an ignoramus or a flatterer.’ The similarly anonymous 19th-century author of The American ...”

“... the ICA show is Bill Viola’s The Reflecting Pool. It shows just that: a rectangular pool in the woods, squarely in front of you. The position of the camera does not change. A man arrives and stands on the edge opposite. He leaps in the air, but instead of splashing into the water hangs, frozen in time, over it. He slowly fades, while on the pool – in ...”