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“... I’m sorry​ , but you have to leave now.’ I am in a café. I don’t know the name, I just walked in and found a place to sit down, tired from an afternoon of traipsing around a city that has always been a bit much for me: too polluted, too noisy, too crowded. Now, however, that fatigue is turning into an inexplicable but near overwhelming lethargy, and I am trying to stay, or at least look, awake for whoever is speaking ...”

“... of winter’; I could have lived happily in a world of perpetual cold. So when I began reading John Evelyn’s diary entries for January and February 1684, I should have been delighted. Instead, I felt an odd revulsion: 9 January: I went across the Thames on the ice, now become so thick as to bear not only streets of booths, in which they roasted ...”

“... length of time and that would be the movie,’ he said. The ‘tests’ – whose subjects include John Ashbery, Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper and Susan Sontag – were shot on 100-foot rolls of black and white film at 24 frames per second, then screened, almost slo-mo, at 16 fps. The results varied: Lou Reed, who had studied drama, brings a Coke bottle as a prop ...”

“... Quite early one May morning, in the last days of a subarctic winter, I strayed from a marked trail I had been walking for just under two hours and discovered I was lost in the north Norwegian tundra. It was something that never should have happened: 99 times out of a hundred, I am a sensible, even cautious wanderer, but that morning, in an odd mood I couldn’t explain other than to say, lamely, that I was sorry to be leaving Finnmark, I had left the borrowed lakeside cabin where I’d been staying and decided to go for one last walk along a not at all hazardous eight-mile trail about thirty miles east of Kautokeino ...”

“... seemed just a little less febrile, she could have passed in the outside world for vivacious. ‘John,’ I said, noticing how dull my voice sounded – and I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘John,’ she repeated, smiling. She gave me a long, appraising look. ‘So. What are you in ...”

“... In the spring of 1958, my family moved from a rat-haunted tenement on King Street to one of the last remaining prefabs in Cowdenbeath. It was a move up, in most ways; the prefabs had been built as temporary wartime accommodation but, to my child’s mind at least, the cold and the damp, the putty-tainted pools of condensation on winter mornings and the airless heat of August afternoons were minor concerns compared with the pleasure of living on our own garden plot, in what was, essentially, a detached house, just yards from a stand of high beech trees where tawny owls hunted through the night, their to-and-fro cries so close it seemed they were right there with us, in the tiny bedroom I shared with my sister, Margaret ...”

“... Back in the 1970s, when my mother was still alive, she got me a job at the fruit and nut processing factory where she worked. It was a good job, clean and fairly light compared to the steel mill where I’d been employed the previous summer and, like all food-related work, it had its perks. My favourite nuts were almonds, which I would send through the fryer in illicit batches, mostly for personal consumption, and it didn’t hurt, during the first few days, to hear from some of the older women that almonds were thought to enhance sexual performance ...”

“... conscious of its literary co-ordinates, and this story falls squarely into the macabre area of John Burnside’s work. It is queerly echoed, for instance, by the conclusion of his prose-poem ‘Aphasia in Childhood’, which deals, in part, with exploring woods as a boy: ‘I was sure, if I dug a few inches deeper, I would find a being which resembled ...”

“... that is the best he can do. Seven years after his father’s death, the poet and novelist John Burnside stumbled almost incidentally on the facts of his early life. Talking to his mother’s sister, he learned that the elder Burnside – ‘Tommy Dick, or George McGhee, or whatever his name was’ – had been ...”

“... for John Burnside You’d know her house by the drawn blinds – by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall, the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry. You’d tell it by the quicken and the pine that hid it from the sea and from the brief light of the sun, and by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door where he died: a rack of bones like a sprung trap ...”

“... His development will be worth watching. Compared to the eclectic, pyrotechnic scatter of Kid, John Burnside’s Feast Days is poised and tactful. His diction is chaste, like cool stones from clear water, with an occasional rarity raised from the bed of the river, a recondite word such as ‘alchemilla’ or ‘pleroma’, or a more common one, such ...”

“... contemporary English poetry seems to have set itself a Herculean task: one named by the Scot John Burnside in ‘Source Code’ – to ‘imagine the suburbs’, in a déjà vu in which, repeatedly, ‘the same life happens again.’ As the poem’s title suggests, the task requires the encoding of difference, of imaginary origins and ends, rather ...”

“... myths, and is temperamentally a northern island or isthmus dweller. In that respect he’s like John Burnside, to whom he dedicated his best poem so far, ‘At Roane Head’ (LRB, 14 August 2008), in which there is not just a selkie at the bottom of the garden but there might be a selkie in the bedroom that could cuckold you, or make you kill your ...”

“... people decide – and then, if it doesn’t get the result it wants, overrule us from Holyrood. John Burnside New states​ are usually the product of catastrophe. Violence is the air they breathe. I can’t decide if it is Scotland’s good or bad fortune that its vote for statehood should take place against the background of an entirely normal birth ...”

“... racist and sexist prejudices, crowning them with a volley of insults against his former beloved John Major. Evans’s outburst coincided with one from Lord Tebbit, another former MP who made a fortune from privatisation – in his case by joining the board of British Telecom, which as Secretary of State for Industry he had privatised. Tebbit’s target was ...”