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“... to accomplish, entailed a Parliamentary union between Peelites like Gladstone and Whigs like Lord John Russell. The Gladstonian Liberal Party, which was to dominate Victorian politics, was conceived in the Ayes lobby that night in 1846: it was their baby. When the baby grew up, it duly encountered its own midlife crisis. In 1886 it was the Liberal Party which ...”

“... you turned out of the village along a concrete track which ran flat for a bit under a splintering ash canopy, then plunged downhill between giant clapboard barns and helter-skelter on, slithery with cowshit and wet mud, past the farmhouse, over a little brick bridge and – woah! – ended in a gate overlooking a field with a bull in it. The day I’m ...”

“... In Judd Street, there are cherries (both wild and cultivated) and more than one species of ash. Limes are not common here, as they are in some other parts of London, where, in summer, they make cars and pavements sticky with falling honey-dew. There are rowans with bright red fruit and spiny Robinias. The total number of species is great, but one ...”

“... struck by lightning’. To Froude, he was ‘a Calvinist without the theology’, Scotland’s new John Knox, ‘whose voice was like the sounding of ten thousand trumpets’. In the 1830s fashionable London had been spellbound by his charismatic presence and his inspirational brew of fire and brimstone. He taught that right is might and might is light and ...”

“... Everyone remembers what they were doing when John Kennedy was killed, but no one even asks what you were doing when Gerald Ford was President. The wonderfully comic, deviously historical premise of John Updike’s new novel is that someone asks. The someone is the plausible-sounding Northern New England Association of American Historians, and the person asked is one Alfred L ...”

“... came from the sarcophagus was soul or smoke, until there was neither woman nor fire nor coffin nor ash. It was late, and only the night, water, the river, darkness lived on in that death. The ‘if’ inflection suggests both that the poet will always remember and that he (or anyone) could always forget: and literally the Spanish says, ‘if I saw anything in ...”

“... at once growing fainterand more sleek.Since it’s for the most partcomposed of vitreous ash, silica,ferrous oak gall,resentment, griefs, squabbles and squallsit may yet enthrallthe plane’s state-of-the-artcombustion chamber, clogging the engine with molten glassthe way a poem may yet stop the heart.One vanishing plume, or pall of dust, leads to ...”

“... William Cobbett of Rural Rides, a farmer’s son and himself a farmer from time to time; John Muir of My First Summer in the Sierra, a farmer’s son and farmer; and Lewis Grassic Gibbon of A Scots Quair, a farmer’s son from the Mearns in north-east Scotland. All three produced work that strikes me as special – as important, if you like ...”

“... prolific: nobody could begin to say how many thousands of his pictures have survived, and how John Bonehill, the curator of this exhibition, decided on his final selection I can’t imagine. Sandby was also enormously versatile: he worked in watercolour, bodycolour (gouache) and oil, he etched, he was the first professional artist in Britain to work in ...”

“... Latin and Eora names for local botanical species. Several are inset with organic materials – ash, bone, shell, resin and human hair – that evoke the Eora’s world of fishing and feasting and its transformation (its holocaust) when white men came. As you walk among the pillars, you can hear taped Aboriginal voices, eerily disembodied, recite the ...”

“... At 750 °C, a diamond will burn. It combusts perfectly, leaving no residue, no ash. That the world’s hardest substance should be so vulnerable to flames is startling; who would have thought that the most precious family jewels could easily be annihilated in a house fire, transformed into carbon dioxide and a little steam, as unremarkable as an exhaled breath? Then again, a diamond is only carbon (with a skin of hydrogen, one molecule thick): why shouldn’t it be almost as combustible as coal? I learned this fact from Tobias Hill’s second novel, The Love of Stones (2001), which is a mine of such information ...”

“... for Heathrow/Blessing the filthy world. Somebody had to.’ And a date concludes the poem – Ash Wednesday. Burgess’s end is certainly in his beginning. Byrne is not so much a summation as yet another brilliant variation, played on an instrument of many talents. A complex instrument certainly, but not a chameleonic one: Burgess himself as maestro is ...”

“... First/Bunny died, then John Latouche,/then Jackson Pollock,’ Frank O’Hara reflects during a post-prandial stroll around midtown Manhattan in ‘A Step away from Them’, written in August 1956. Everyone knew Jackson Pollock and the lyricist John Latouche, but only insiders to the avant-garde coteries in which O’Hara moved would have known who Bunny was – especially since she published under the name V ...”

“... But in the first part of the 20th century those channels seemed to silt up again until Marinell Ash published her poignant appeal The Strange Death of Scottish History in 1980. By then, however, Scotland’s cultural and political revival was already underway. Synoptic histories, serious but highly readable, were reappearing as ...”

“... with its local grass and trees, and its toys and slide. He has even less regard for the late John Aspinall’s approach at Howletts in Kent, where the gorillas romp through their entire lives in a series of gymnasia. But I reckon the gorillas divide the hundreds of species of tree in their native tropical forests fairly simply into those that can be ...”