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“... 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 ...”

“... travelled since the universe cooled enough to give them free passage. In this neck of the cosmic woods, life may not be all that rare. Rees estimates that even our own galaxy carries millions of Earth-like planets. Admittedly, failure to detect extraterrestrials suggests that most of the planets are ‘Earth-like’ only in offering suitable ...”

“... When John Muir, the son of an emigrant from East Lothian to southern Wisconsin, was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water ...”

“... another five years, despite continuing tensions over loan repayments and the warning of its boss, John Hope Simpson, a former Indian Civil Service official, that the ‘unpleasant duty’ of debt collection and mass evictions would ‘probably lead to revolution’. Yet the League continued to roll out unpopular debt-led development projects. In the early ...”

“... save his Chelsea friends from heroin addiction and himself from taking his chances in West Beirut; John Chadwick, who leaves the City to pay for the running-costs of his wife’s damp and dilapidated house in Italy with dodgy investments and asset sales, in Davy Chadwick; Richard Verey in Slide, after spells in the Foreign Service and on Wall ...”

“... song was that of a raped and mutilated woman. In the poetry of the 13th-century Franciscan John Peckham, the nightingale foresees the hour of her own death, singing from the top of a tree and descending ever lower, until finally she expires on the lowest branch at the ninth hour.Nightingales winter in sub-Saharan West Africa and then journey six ...”

“... of the house, towards what I liked to think of as open country, the fields ran away to the strip woods, in one direction, and the grey, leechy waters of Loch Fitty, in the other, and I wandered out there whenever I could, imagining myself a child of the countryside, like the boys in picture books, or one of the chums from the Rupert annuals my Auntie Sall ...”

“... necessarily, self-servingly clueless about what really happened in Vietnam, In the Lake of the Woods is that strangest of all mysteries, the whodunnit in which the puzzle apparently remains unsolved. Did O’Brien’s protagonist, John Wade, murder his wife? Or not? And what happens to Wade himself? O’Brien does not ...”

“... version of pastoral is more fashionable than ever. ‘In a time of informational overload,’ John Updike wrote in an introduction to Walden, ‘of clamorously inane and ubiquitous electronic entertainment, and of a fraught, globally challenged and ever more demanding workplace, the urge to build a cabin in the ...”

“... that poem is in some ways the centrepiece of Vendler’s book. The trouble is there’s more to John Ashbery than ‘The Painter’, ‘Drunken Americans’ and his other disquisitions on the Reflective Sublime. To compare Vendler’s choice with Ashbery’s, in the invaluable Selected Poems, is to find a troubling divergence. She gives us nothing, for ...”

“... a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on the editorial floor, when Evans declared that he was not resigning ...”

“... that she radically undermines traditional masculine values. In another centenary study, however, John Robinson insists that she is a timeless lyric poet whose work is not ‘centrally representative of women’. Robinson’s refusal to consider Dickinson’s polemical and subversive imagination is disappointing, but it can be argued that certain writers ...”

“... led her to put such effort into paring herself down to the bone – as in the line from a poem by John Hewitt: ‘A tree is truer for its being bare.’ However, when it comes to her ‘recalling’ a rape by a motorcycle gang, even Josie concedes that it may have all been in her head: ‘A common fantasy among young women, so I’m told.’ What did happen ...”