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“... lives similar to those endured by the Scots. Their cabins were made out of tree trunks, with moss stuffed into the cracks. ‘Every house hath a pair of stairs that lead up into the chambers out of the yard or street after the Scottish manner.’Milton addressed the sweep of this empire when, in his role as secretary to the Protectorate, he composed a ...”

“... Keats walked this coast he felt it followed him,’ I said. But our plans involved Robert Burns. Karl, since he first began publishing Seamus in the New Statesman in the 1960s, always felt there was a clear affinity between Burns and Heaney. They were both the sons of farmers and they both allowed nature to oxygenate the mind and inflect the ...”

“... the Daleks were made the subject of two big storylines in the relaunched Doctor Who. In the first, Robert Shearman’s ‘Dalek’, the last living representative of the race is tortured by American operatives in orange boilersuits at an underground facility; he falls in love with Rose, the new Doctor’s main assistant, and comes to understand his ...”

“... failing to intercede on the victims’ behalf. This was the line taken in Massacre in Rome (and in Robert Katz’s book on which the film was based). Cosmatos and his producer, Carlo Ponti, were prosecuted for ‘defaming the memory of the pope’ and received six-month suspended sentences.Even more astonishing were the legal proceedings in 1994 against ...”

“... barren detested vale’ with ‘trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,/Overcome with moss and baleful mistletoe’. Sometimes, though, it appears that more literal realisations were intended. Of course the two stage pillars that supported the ‘heavens’ might readily stand in as trees; but in a few cases at least property trees and bushes seem ...”

“... smelling to human nostrils of decay, ‘a sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and leather, and yeast’. Crow has a nose of his own, and assesses the widower’s bouquet with a wine columnist’s precision and panache: ‘notes of rotten hedge, bluebottles’. His relationship to his victim/client has a number of ...”

“... the west coast of North America to Europe or Asia. ‘But coming from Asia is easier.’ In 1889 Robert Louis Stevenson, in the final chapter of a wandering life, settled on a hillside above Apia, the Samoan capital. He bought three hundred acres of jungle, and built a two-storey timber house. He was 39 and accompanied by his American wife, Fanny, her two ...”

“... Cut down of a Sunday morning by dragoons     Grounded the English Covenant In ling and peat-moss. Sound of singing drifts     Tossed up like spume, persistently Pulsing through history and out of it. Davie’s work has integrity in the simple sense: it holds together, and preoccupations recur in different forms and throw light on each other alike ...”

“... victims of Western standards of humanity.’ Editing the piece for the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers objected to the unqualified critique of Western capitalism: ‘Won’t you keep in mind the Western reader who might not want to cross the slag heaps with you?’ (She felt he had edited the piece into a ‘mild, unchallenging plea’.) With its ...”

“... their beautifully elaborated and uncomplicating meaning. The hammer of modern English metre, what Robert Graves called the smith-work of ti-tum, ti-tum, is going on during the deeper, longer oar-work of Old English, and the ear, no matter how ignorant it may be of the provenance of what it is hearing, picks up on the contest. This contest, perfectly ...”

“... phylum in 1773, called it kleiner Wasserbär (‘little water bear’); they’re also known as moss piglets. More than a thousand species have since been identified, found everywhere from the seabed to the peaks of the Himalayas. The oldest tardigrade fossils date from 530 million years ago. They can survive for several minutes at 150°C or near absolute ...”

“... that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its socket and eaten it); Robert Crabbe had lost several toes, which I did not think too serious until he explained they were required for balance (I understood balance in the negative context of not having enough of it, hence those shameful safety wheels fastened to my bicycle).At some ...”

“... too. He found that he shared his interest in dirty books with ‘the sensitive and worldly-wise’ Robert Conquest and together they went on expeditions, trawling the specialist shops for their respective bag in a partnership that seems both carefree and innocent. Unusual, too, as I had always thought that porn, looking for it and looking at it, was something ...”

“... A new product the Cadburys had been counting on to turn things around, a drink called Iceland Moss, made of cocoa mixed with lichen, failed to find favour with the public.The first step to commercial salvation was the purchase, with the last of George’s inheritance, of a machine designed by a family of Dutch chocolatiers, the van Houtens. Up to that ...”

“... drinking troughs lying about in the yard, and we’d play in them for half the summer. Cranberry Moss Farm, McLaughlin’s Farm on Byrehill, Ashgrove Farm, the Old Mains – nowadays they are all buried under concrete, except for the farm at Toddhill, which became a home for the mentally handicapped. In my youth they had been like haunted houses. There were ...”