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“... by a gust of testosterone and a few tumbleweeds of pubic hair: the Old Man, the Deep Male – Iron John. Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, ‘dominated’ the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year, and has made, as we shall see, a heavy ...”

“... a large letter T. Elless had stubbornly refused to name the father, but she was spotted in the woods the night before she died with Peter Adams, a married yeoman farmer who, Vaisey tells us, had already fathered 11 legitimate children, and a bastard on someone else. Turner and others now suspected that Adams might be implicated in Elless’s death, but it ...”

“... to creature comforts. I wondered, for instance, if the Russians had got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassured me. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perrierstroika?’ The Writers’ Union is a pleasant one-storeyed 19th-century building set round a leafy courtyard and currently being refurbished against Mr Reagan’s visit. He is to have lunch here. We ...”

“... from the roofs, we could hear the galloping approach of spring. We left the snowdrops in the woods alone. We were waiting for May. We were going to pick strawberries.  Already, the woodpeckers were drilling in the trees. It rained frequently. The rains were soft, a velvety water. They might last all day, two days, a week. Not a wind blew, the clouds ...”

“... Transylvania to the Danube gorges, had long been published. A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) were adored by readers thirsty for the final instalment. By then, Leigh Fermor, generous, handsome, brave and crazily talented, was already a hero. He had written fiction and travel books; he had fought as a partisan in Crete and ...”

“... again.’ ‘Always’ seems a bit of a stretch, but the idea is interesting. Petzold thinks of John Wayne in The Searchers – ‘also a ghost’, he says – and we could add James Stewart in Vertigo struggling to bring back to life a woman who isn’t dead. And closer to home, or to Germany, we could think of Petzold’s film Phoenix (2014), where a ...”

“... is convinced he is a Mafia hit man, come to reclaim the $100,000 she stole in Las Vegas. In the woods opposite, a homicidal public schoolboy, intoxicated by too much Frederick Forsyth, is taking pot shots at anything that moves. Since he’s a demon marksman, the casualty rate is high. Like Restoration Comedy, Sharpe’s plots defy summary. But the comic ...”

“... June 1823) Byron was settling his accounts with his creditors, with his public, with his publisher John Murray, with his mistress, and making arrangements to settle his accounts with life and fame. Late in this volume we see Byron discussing a collected edition of his poems with J.W. Lake. Elsewhere Byron says he wants to amass enough money to be able to leave ...”

“... was light. And God said “Er – could I just see the darkness again?”’ If this is not Pope John Paul II’s kind of God, it’s as much because of the hesitancy as the gender. If he were ever in two minds on a subject, both of them would be infallible. Not for nothing was the priest who taught him theology in Rome known as ‘The Rigid’. As a Polish ...”

“... its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present America.’ This was John Updike in 1961, saying of J.D. Salinger what critics since have been saying of John Updike: that here is a novelist uncannily responsive to the ‘personality’, if we can use the word, of his own culture. Updike, it has ...”

“... than Continental ones ‘to turn their backs on industry’ and make off to the fields and woods. This is probably true, but one wonders whether the Continental families they have in mind (Krupp? Thyssen? Agnelli?) would all be considered aristocratic in Continental terms, however many titles and even quarterings they may have acquired by now. Families ...”

“... rather than a participant. At the beginning of the novel, he is living alone in the Berkshire woods, where he enjoys a visit from his old high-school English teacher, Murray Ringold. As the 90-year-old Murray passes several martini-flavoured nights on Nathan’s porch, their conversation returns again and again to Murray’s long dead brother Ira, who was ...”

“... maids, and later to move to a beautifully distinctive small mansion (including a 15-acre croft and woods) on the smiling green slopes of Easter Ross. Throughout all this he pleased himself. He did not write to other people’s formulae (or not exactly). When Cape wanted him to repeat the Juan model in his fourth novel, he declined, and wrote on Scottish ...”

“... book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David ...”

“... mainly from the study he undertakes with Miss Crompton of the ants that live in the nearby woods, the meticulousness of which testifies – as does so much else in these novels – to the meticulousness of Byatt’s own Victorian researches. The pair are especially interested in the Formica sanguinea, the red ants who capture ants of other species and ...”