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“... In the early days of colour television you could buy a device which, it was said, would convert your black and white set. It consisted of a transparent plastic sheet, half blue and half green. You stuck it over the screen, in the hope that once in a while the sky and the prairie would divide the picture in the right proportions ...”

“... Once there was a town hall official in Cumberland who was so enthralled by the mountains that he walked and walked them, penetrating every byway, surveying every vista. To amuse himself he drew them and wrote about them, year after year. And the more his marriage languished, the more he walked, and drew, and wrote, until the seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells were complete ...”

“... of them. And in New Hampshire, the only state in the North-East that Gore failed to carry – a state whose three electoral votes would have made him President even without Florida – Nader’s vote comfortably exceeded Bush’s margin of victory. Green Party supporters told pollsters that, in the absence of Nader, they would have voted overwhelmingly ...”

“... David Gower was this year’s most popular victim, the English underdog, the handsome knight sacrificed by knaves. But good news is at hand: the hero has announced a brilliant season full of runs. In the tradition of General MacArthur, David Gower has announced his return ...”

“... twenty years ago, partly out of gratitude. I had just started watching birds, I was terrible at it, and the big black creatures – two and a half feet tall, with a wingspan of more than four feet – were easy to find, even in my field guide. Unlike the variegated wood warblers ...”

“... It was a curious set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing ...”

“... In​ Le Désordre AZERTY (2014), a collection of writings based on the layout of a French computer keyboard, the novelist Éric Chevillard wrote: Literature, more than the zoo, makes it its mission to be a conservatory of animal life … could anybody go without this vocabulary: warthog, elephant, orangutan, gorilla, stork, anaconda, babirusa, dugong, manatee, beetle, tarantula, octopus, camel, hummingbird, chickadee, osprey, chameleon, alligator, rhinoceros, kangaroo ...”

“... Country, which is concerned with old age, death and family bereavement, is adroitly restricted to an account of four visits. The first two, at intervals of a year, are paid by Daniel Francoeur, an American writer long resident in London, to his aging ...”

“... Farmer’s​ Glory, the classic agrarian memoir by A.G. Street, was published in 1932. The traditional mixed farm where Arthur Street spent his boyhood in the first decade of the 20th century was the centre of a self-sufficient community, stout in defence of the four-course rotation and despising anything shop-bought ...”

“... to Max Brod, his lifelong friend and first editor and biographer, Kafka loved the movies; at times, Brod reported, he would talk about little else. For the most part, however, Kafka abstained from written commentary on the cinema. To be sure, there are scattered remarks in diaries and letters from the period 1908-13. But that’s about it. The ...”

“... Few writers​ have seemed less likely to produce a modern myth than Bram Stoker, not only because of the limits of his ability and imagination but because for much of his life he was furiously overworked as house manager for Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London. Aside from Dracula, Stoker wrote nothing of note, and plenty that was excruciating ...”

“... Bart and Lisa from school, on skateboard and bike respectively; Homer in his car from his job at the nuclear plant; Marge in her car with baby Maggie from the supermarket. They all arrive at precisely the same time, and make a dash for the living-room sofa, all five hitting it ...”

“... buildings and their settings, but it’s tempting to be distracted by what you already know about a place, about Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, for instance, the latest county to have its volume revised and expanded by Yale.* The mid-18th-century country house designed by James Paine is described as ‘utilitarian’ but ...”

“... The idea that Britain’s countryside has been ruined is hard to credit at first, especially if you live in a Northern village. Three minutes’ walk from home I have started a woodcock on the edge of a disused orchard, beside a triangle of meadow bordered by a hawthorn, ash and elder hedge full of brambles which the landlord of the Royal used to pick to use in his homemade icecream ...”

“... the existence of Sam Shepard some eighteen months ago. He had, after all, just been nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Chuck Yeager in the film about the first American astronauts, The Right Stuff. And news of his romance with Jessica Lange, whom he was then partnering in Country, had just broken. Arthur ...”