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“... mastery of language, a mastery inculcated by making the child play with blocks of painted wood in standard colours. (I wonder when that began? It seems to have been current in Queen Victoria’s time.) Darwin himself noticed that children have much more difficulty acquiring colour words than in picking up names for things, and was rightly ...”

“... that it was factually correct. Clutching the galleys, I rang the bell at his house in St John’s Wood. Sir Thomas himself opened the door. He did not seem friendly. However, he allowed me into his drawing-room, though without offering me a chair, and himself sat down and began to read. Never before or since have I seen anyone so slowly and yet so inexorably ...”

“... readers, encouraged some novelists almost to usurp the short story’s usual dimensions. When Ian McEwan moved on from short-story writing, it was to produce a first "novel", The Cement Garden (1978), not much in excess of one hundred pages.’ Ah, so that is why McEwan’s novels are so short. What layers of evasion are hidden in that careful verb ...”

“... great man, however bashful, stumbling and dishevelled. It is the work of a tyrannicide subject, in Ian Hamilton’s words, to ‘tyrant delusions’. Lowell was a pacifist who was able, at moments, to praise the ideology of the master race. Mischievously mad or mischievously sane, it was hard to tell which, he once urged companions to exercise a sortes ...”

“... biologist of the whole living being. All creatures are in their own ways social creatures, be they wood ants, turtles or politicians. He is the kind of biologist – the most common kind – who emphasises complexity, and he does not want to reduce the complex to simpler structures or formulae. Next to Dobzhansky’s mantra, perhaps the most common line in the ...”

“... of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes ...”

“... complexity. Everything between Tolstoy on the one side and honestly unserious Wodehouse or Ian Fleming, say, on the other – Waugh, Greene, Joyce, you name it – will have for him something of the status of kitsch or poshlost, will be fundamentally untrue, in some way. The problem for the critic is not just that the Tolstoyan or Shakespearean or ...”

“... Geologists seem destined to lock horns with those who want to interpret the Bible story literally. Ian Plimer, a geologist at the University of Melbourne and an expert in Turkish geology, recently placed his livelihood in peril to challenge what he sees as Creationist nonsense. A group of local fundamentalists, led by one Allen Roberts, claimed to have found ...”

“... choreographed disaster involving a hydrogen weather balloon. The scene puts one in mind of Ian McEwan’s balloon disaster in Enduring Love, but this isn’t the first time Foden has shown an interest in balloons: two of the characters in Ladysmith escape the siege in an observation balloon. Perhaps he just likes them. Before this, though, Meadows has ...”

“... Holder whiskers, the period of ‘Exposure’, of ‘long-haired and thoughtful’, of the ‘wood-kerne’ and the ‘inner émigré’. But the cheekbones are there. And a listener for sure. ‘You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note,’ he has the ghost of Joyce address him in the marvellous ‘Station Island’ sequence from 1984. Tweed ...”

“... he was cautious to the last – have the sense of ‘being able to do what angels can’. James Wood writes: I have good reason to remember Frank Kermode’s collection of essays The Art of Telling, because it was the first book I ever stole. Between the ages of 16 and 18 I lifted more than a few books from shops. Resources were very slight, and the hunger ...”

“... used for the storage of old tally-sticks, great stacks of obsolete financial records notched on wood. The tallies were ‘entirely useless’, according to the Treasury. Phipps and his colleague Richard Weobley came up with an economical solution: they would send the tallies, two cartloads’ worth of fiscal kindling, as extra fuel for the stoves under the ...”

“... memoirs and wistful outsider essays. Black Bill, who appears in the Country Life journalist Ian Niall’s Poacher’s Handbook (1950), is a perfect specimen. He has a black, tousled beard and an over-large jacket and can charm partridges from their roosts with a brass whistle. He also uses raisins to catch pheasants like Danny’s dad in Roald Dahl’s ...”

“... to Mrs Thatcher and her faction in the Party. On 22 March – the day, incidentally, on which Mr Ian Scott, a Shropshire farmer, was counting his trees, with a view to felling, in the very coppice in which Miss Murrell’s body was to be found two days later – Mr Heseltine began his investigation into the documents which have come to be known as the Crown ...”

“... listens, very knowledgably, to a lot of Western music, jazz, popular and classical. Norwegian Wood, recently released in English, although already translated into many other languages, was Murakami’s first great success in Japan.* It is named after the Beatles song and is not unlike The Catcher in the Rye or L’Education sentimentale, or something ...”