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“... In the Great War he was wounded five times, at the Battle of Loos and at the Somme. At Delville Wood he was hit in the thigh and pelvis and rolled down into a large shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus. He wrote home on 13 September 1916 that ‘the stench from the dead bodies which ...”

“... it happens, used to be a baby-sitter for us, when her parents lived next door to us in St John’s Wood. As we say in writing to congratulate her, when one’s baby-sitter is a cabinet minister one realises one is really old!21 May 1997. Howard Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the ...”

“... regulations of no avail as Railtrack claim public safety as a justification. If it happened to a wood that I was fond of I’d be inclined to find out the address of the local Railtrack manager, take along a chainsaw and do the same to his precious plot. 30 March. To Petersfield on a cold, blue day, the traffic thick over Hammersmith Bridge, where crowds are ...”

“... about her), while Peter wrote his poem of wetness and ‘Wallow’ entitled ‘Water-Witch, Wood-Witch, Wine-Witch’, annotating it with a manuscript that makes clear it was about Dilly. Redgrove took up a teaching post at the School of Art in Falmouth in 1966; he and Barbara were still together and he continued his affairs with Dilly and with ...”

“... or worse? Interesting as these questions are, if you focus on them too narrowly you can miss the wood for the trees. Some of Donne’s best religious poems have nothing to do with inter or intra-confessional controversy or division. ‘If Poisonous Minerals’ points out how strange it is that Christianity’s threat of eternal torture applies only to ...”

“... mentality.’ ‘We just want to save resources,’ said Martin, with a sigh. ‘It’s more of a Robin Hood model – we’re stealing from the corporations. We found a bin today with fifty or sixty cartons of milk inside.’ Everything Alf and Martin own is in the van. They sleep in the back and they don’t have sex with anyone. I asked Alf if there ...”

“... along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel Beau-Site was commandeered by the French government and turned into a hospital. This, together with the wartime rent controls imposed on landlords, made the family ...”

“... profound experience of Clare’s childhood. One morning he went to gather rotten sticks from the wood, then decided ‘to wander about the fields’. He gazed over the yellow furze of Emmonsales Heath, and imagined, he says in his autobiography, ‘that the world’s end was at the edge of the horizon and that a day’s journey was able to find it’. He ...”

“... the Frederica quartet, was a kind of internal geography. Over on the left, in the darkness, is the wood where the smooth-between-the-legs Alexander is not quite managing to make it happen with the frustrated housewife Jenny, released into the ache of the unattainable by her part in the play being put on at Long Royston. Up in the tower is the evasive poet ...”

“... likes of a woman wouldn’t go in the Red Lamp.My grandfather knows about English things such as Robin Hood and Harvest Festival; I sit on his knee as he hums ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. My grandmother says: ‘George, teaching that child Protestant hymns!’ I dip my finger in his beer to taste it. For high days I have a thimble-sized glass to ...”

“... Wiertz is hardly an old master, about suffering he wasn’t wrong either. 25 June. As I leave Robin Hope’s birthday party at the Old Sessions House in Clerkenwell Square someone says that England scored in the first minute against Portugal. The pubs I pass seem oddly subdued, with none of the usual crowds spilling out onto the pavement or the roars from ...”

“... hospital admissions in the US in 1873, 29 million a year in the Sixties. ‘Who killed cock robin?’ one of his sources asks: who killed the primary-care doctor whose job it was to provide individual solace? Again, the division of labour that characterises industrial-style medicine has its virtues. Specialisation pays. The greatest ‘cutter for ...”

“... into trouble. Last year, Jo Shuter, the former head of Quintin Kynaston Academy in St John’s Wood, was banned from teaching after admitting to widespread misuse of public funds – using school money for taxis, phones and a great many flowers, plus £7000 for her 50th birthday party and £8269 for a boutique-hotel jolly for senior staff. The school was ...”

“... of Sixth Avenue, in the vicinity of Washington Square, at a more sedate watering-hole, with more wood than chrome, a juke box inclining more towards jazz and smokey-voiced balladeers than towards disco, where I might come across the occasional young lady. Not long after my brother unburdened himself to me I wound up living with him for extended ...”

“... Anwar’s. She had passed the shop many times as it was midway between the flats and St John’s Wood High Street; indeed she remembered it opening and the little draper’s and babies’ knitwear shop which it had replaced and where she had been a loyal customer. That had been kept by a Miss Dorsey, from whom over the years she had bought the occasional ...”