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“... done, and says: ‘It’s not those misfits I’m worrying about, it’s you.’ ‘Me?’ said John. ‘Why?’ ‘You’re getting too fond of bullying,’ said Veronica, ‘it interferes with your charm, and charm’s essential for your success.’ She went out to make the coffee. What Veronica said was very true, thought ...”

“... and Myres, and Stenton) and Taylor’s. I doubt if the new one will fare any better. John Roberts, the general editor, does not show his hand in detail, and we must keep our fingers crossed about the whole being greater than the parts by giving ‘an account of the development of our country in time’ – ‘our country’ meaning something ...”

“... 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him. He seems to have been immune to such essentially human feelings. Carlyle happened to be in the library in 1875 when Bryan Courthope ...”

“... pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy accident.) Multiple pseudonymy as a device of ...”

“... the wake of the couple’s acrimonious separation. Byron’s side of the story went up in smoke in John Murray’s grate when the poet’s publisher presided over the burning of his memoirs. If we want Byron’s relationships with those who knew him, why should we not just read his often wonderful letters? One answer might be that Leslie Marchand’s 12-volume ...”

“... or Byronic about him. Though his funny face had great charm he was the reverse of handsome: John Sparrow, in one of his feline mots, remarked that ‘the trouble with Cyril is that he is not so beautiful as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Byron in particular, were damaged and distorted, although the saddest story is that of his brother John. They both went to prison for libelling the prince regent, John as publisher and Leigh as editor of the Examiner. Politically, John was as radical as Leigh, and they were very close. (In ...”

“... It never switches off; even asleep we listen in to gravity itself. Crossing a field is one long exercise in equilibrium – a player’s grace – though what we mean by that has more to do with music than the physics we imagine. A history of forest and the murk of oceans, nice adjustments in the memory of bone lead us to this: the gaze; the upright form ...”

“... A wintering;                          and everything we knowis hearsay: ravenspicking at a blood-knot in the snow, the villagelost, two miles away, the roadsimpassable.       All summer,there were others in the housedisguised as children, charmless, ravening,but clothed, as children are,in swansdown, proofedlike saints against the dayof judgment, when the livestock in the barngrow weary of themselves, their textbook formsreduced to hoof and bone, their dreams of lightdiscarded for the banquetry of slopson which we feed,though no one here is lean ...”

“... Ferenczi wrote in 1938 that acts preparatory to coitus all served in different ways to duplicate the narcissistic self. The syllabus of kissing, stroking, biting and the rest facilitates the loss of boundaries between the different partners and divests the woman of her terror. Now your bliss- equipment is discarded, and our clothes are heaped in different tumuli, my male decision falters ...”

“... Language the contract Between self and nothing When bending to earth it Exchanges the sky for words Out walking on that Uncertain estuary border Where we found the beached conger – It was starting to swell And gull-flight lifting over Ocean pectoral surge – I walked there a neighbour To that small ancient heart Tracing the shallow architecture ...”

“... I want to begin again, climbing through beech roots and gulls to the hill of the fairies, to nest with the rooks, to sleep amongst broken yews, to crouch in the dark of the ice house, close to the stone; I’ll come after dark and feel the wet drift of their bodies, they’ll share me with the foxes and the deer, or borrow my human warmth to weave a caul for the child they have stolen and though I could say they are only imagined, the shiver in me that puts them there is real, a wish for something quick against a skin that cools too soon, and wears itself too lightly ...”

“... Stepping outside in the dark, if only to fetch the coal, this December night, I stop in a river of wind on the cellar steps and think of men, no different from me, transforming themselves at will to animals – misshapen lives suspended in the blood slithering loose and loping away through the snow half-flesh, half-dream; or, coming in, I turn to face the cold with nothing in my veins but haemoglobin, the thought of someone not unlike myself in borrowed senses – marten, dog-fox, wolf – coming to some new scent, some bitter truth, and gulping it down in the dark while the hunters listen ...”

“... Out in the field where, once,we played Dead Man’s Fall,the others are being calledthrough the evening dusk– Kenny and Marek, the Corrigans, Alex McClure –mothers and sisters calling them home for teafrom kitchens fogged with steam and buttered toast,broth on the hot plate, ham hough and yellow lentils.Barely a wave, then they’re gone, till no one is left,and the dark from the woods closes in on myself alone,the animals watching, the older godscouched in the shadows ...”