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“... by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The justification for such work-rates, beyond the economics of scraping a living and the PR ...”

“... feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their ...”

“... The Thing about Joe Sullivan, probably the most likeable collection by a not always likeable poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one. Fisher has never aspired to the sort of readership that Heaney and ...”

“... stalks, grey ropes of pea vines, dead clumps of wild oats, for a quick burning-off. We are making ash for the next generation, I tell him. The fire whips about in the cold late autumn easterly. It should cut apart the flames but incites them. Tim, analytical as always, notes the colour of flame and distance of colour from the fuel. The orange and yellow ...”

“... thing, start doing poetry and prose that is nothing but ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. This is what John Fuller’s new rhymes for children are: they announce their literariness and children can no doubt admire it, for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who said, “Peacock ...”

“... Mediterranean and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire ...”

“... professional. In the mid-17th century, the Royal Society established a committee including Dryden, John Evelyn and Edmund Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of ...”

“... defined for centuries by how it seemed emerging from the earth: fragile dicotyledon smudged with ash, not sixty feet of constituted rain. Archaeology Imagine they knew already: a loved one singled out in permafrost, or sand; fingertips laying stitch-marks in the skin that might be read; each wedding-feast or name-day laying claim to birth ...”

“... Dieback. Four weeks ago the government was contemplating an inferno of ash trees from top to bottom and east to west of the UK. The press were talking up the enemy, Chalara fraxinea, as the mother of all fungi, a Milosevic-Saddam pathogen that had to be stopped in its tracks. The trouble was that no one knew how to target the offender ...”

“... the Ancient Celts We wanted to seal his mouth with a handful of clay, to cover his eyes with the ash of the last bonfire he made at the rainiest edge of the garden and didn’t we think, for a moment, of crushing his feet so he couldn’t return to the house at Halloween, to stand at the window, smoking and peering in, the look on his face like that flaw in ...”

“... John Le Carré called it ‘the Abteilung’, but the real name of the East German foreign intelligence department was the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or Main Intelligence Directorate, and the man who ran it for almost 34 years was Markus Wolf. When the Berlin Wall fell, three years after his retirement in 1986, Wolf was courted by other intelligence services – West German, American, even Israeli – who hoped to exploit his vulnerable position ...”

“... them. This is particularly true of his paintings based on fascist architecture. The vast canvas Ash Flower (1983-97) is more than seven and a half metres long, and almost four in height, and shows a large ruin of what had been a classical interior in plunging single-point perspective, clay, ash and earth forming the ...”

“... appeal Soviet Communism had for outsiders. He has a blind spot for religion. The name of Pope John Paul II does not even appear in the Index. The effect is to reduce his account of the end of Communism to a story of the triumph of Western consumer capitalism. Given his emphasis on Europe’s darkness, Mazower might occasionally have paused to evoke ...”

“... were liable to get bogged down in the phonology of Middle English dialects and the mysteries of ‘ash one’ and ‘ash two’. Yet the history of a language is an indispensable guide to the cultural history of its speakers. And with English we are lucky in having an exceptionally rich and lengthy record through which we ...”

“... that perhaps only a Russian historian could write. The last two chapters are devoted to Germany. John Connelly looks at a cache of letters to the local leadership of the Nazi Party in Eisenach, and illustrates once again how diverse were the concerns articulated. Soldiers wrote from the Front, for example, to complain on behalf of their wives. And he has ...”