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“... Hearing you were dead, I went out to look at mountains. Forty years we had been friends, writing between cities, meeting in cities, talking of anarchist persons and principles and never climbing a mountain together. Yet all it meant was mountains, and always in your poems the mountains rose, bright as freedom, crystalline as science. Kenneth, you were like Shaw ...”

“... The White Man’s inability or refusal even to see the existence of Indian economic systems is the one theme that threads its way through the story of the New World,’ says Hugh Brody in Maps and Dreams. ‘European beliefs that hunting people occupied the bottom rung of an evolutionary ladder, together with contrary views of the hunter as an ideal of human existence alongside which contemporary European or American destruction of the Noble Savage could be judged and condemned, are two of the rhetorics that, in different ways, consign hunting peoples to the dustbins of history ...”

“... I am convinced, after reading his book, The Man who was B. Traven, that the BBC producer Will Wyatt has (with some notable assistance from others) finally solved one of the most tantalising literary mysteries of our age, and has established, as firmly as it ever will be, the identity of the novelist who called himself B. Traven. In the process, he has shown that Traven was perhaps the most multiply pseudonymous man in literary history: at various stages in his life he used no less than 27 aliases, not counting his nom-de-plume and his real name which, as Mr Wyatt persuasively demonstrates, was not Ret Marut – the first name under which he presented himself to public attention – but Hermann Albert Otto Max Fiege, that of a native of the East Prussian village of Schwiebus, now in the Polish province of Poznan ...”

“... autobiography, delivered out of the left-hand corner of his mouth. ‘When I was a boy in Chicago, George, selling small dogs for sexual purposes …’ Relations with Rexroth alternated between times of enthusiastic acceptance and times of harsh rejection, at least with men; towards women he was much more consistently benevolent. Perhaps the reason I never ...”

“... Remembered by Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (Ariel, 287 pp., £3.95, 5 January, 0 563 20200 9), George Orwell: A Personal Memoir by T.R. Fyvel (Hutchinson, reissue, 221 pp., £4.95, October 1983, 0 09 151741 9), Unwelcome Guerrilla. George Orwell and the ‘New Statesman’: An Anthology, edited by Alan ...”

“... correspondents – right up to the miners’ strike of 1984-85.’ In a fascinating essay about George Woodcock, the TUC General Secretary in the 1960s, Taylor expresses similar feelings about the unions’ inability to establish a relationship with government which would give them a lasting right to joint decision-making. ...”

“... Aloof with rolling eye’; he didn’t like the neologistic epithet ‘penis’, partly because George Barker had used it first, partly because penises can only with difficulty be imagined to have ‘rolling’ eyes. ‘What the lighthouse was more like (the one at Dungeness) was a vinegar bottle with a perforated ceramic attachment to its cork, enabling ...”

“... court injunctions and hurling makeshift weapons at advancing militiamen from behind barricades. George Pullman was so sure that labour insurgents would desecrate his corpse that he left instructions for his lead-lined casket to be covered with tar paper and asphalt and deposited in a vault made of concrete and reinforced steel. Small conspiratorial ...”

“... to cut defence spending, end conscription and maintain full employment: indeed, Vic Feather and George Woodcock, both future TUC General Secretaries, would visit him in secret to give him private briefings. The Suez crisis and Eden’s departure put Macleod on the spot. He had always supported Butler but when Salisbury came round to make his soundings ...”

“... a survey of previous research. For thirty years the standard work of this kind in English has been George Woodcock’s Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962), which was a synthesis – an inexpensive paperback, elegantly written, deliberately designed for ordinary readers rather than scholars. There have been other general ...”

“... spiralling silently upwards a few yards below me in a corrie of Beinn Alligin in Torridon, or a woodcock zigzagging through a deserted orchard two hundred yards east of my Cumbrian home, or a kestrel darting in and out of a Yorkshire cliff as it hunted the nestlings of the martins’ autumn broods and feathers spattered down around my feet. Guillemot ...”

“... The tide of modern art wasn’t long in coming: in the first Impressionist salon in 1874, George Braquemond showed an etching of Manet’s Olympia alongside an intriguing version of Rain, Steam and Speed. He captured some of the elements of Turner’s title – the wind-driven rain slashes across the bridge – but his train appears as static as a ...”

“... slutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninnie-hammer flycatchers, noddiepeak simpletons, turdie gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets’. As these few tasters from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais indicate, swearing can be ...”

“... lost redpolls but finding solace in siskins, watching lapwings mopping at a wet sky, or hearing a woodcock grunting its love song overhead at dusk, or feeling redstarts tug you in pursuit of them by quivering their rusty tails? That list is mine; every birder will have their own. To me ducks seem hard to love while thrushes are easy. Some birders in recent ...”

“... at least some of them, imagined themselves to be blazing a trail for advanced industrial society. George Brown’s incomes policy and National Plan and, later, the Social Contract were claimed as major socio-economic innovations – British firsts. The Manchu Empire had suffered similar ethnocentric delusions and had published maps which showed it to lie at ...”