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“... Some​ of M. John Harrison’s books have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi ...”

“... Joe, and causes a momentary sense of identification with the sadistic father (‘Perhaps I’m more like him than I had thought’). But the chance opportunity to save Joe from an accidental death purges her of guilt and aggression, and reconciles her to the truth that her childhood companion is also her husband’s ex-mistress: ‘ “Of course you know ...”

“... recounted by Dava Sobel. Rather, her hero, the ‘lone genius’ of her ostentatious subtitle, is John Harrison, a dour Yorkshire carpenter and village choirmaster who spent half a century from the early 1720s trying to make clocks capable of determining longitude and to convince metropolitan grandees that he had done so. Kendall’s watch was a faithful ...”

“... the two friends:   ‘Are you sure it’s broken?’   ‘Yes.’   He stared at me. It seemed that he looked harder and longer than he should have done because he turned away sharply. Not sharply enough though. I had seen the look come across his face briefly, but in that instant I knew his thoughts. He had an odd air of detachment. I felt ...”

“... for granted. In the same interview, he explains what this process, if not the result, means: In my poetry, I’ve tried to explore down to the roots of existence – individual and psychic existence – to find zones of experience which can’t yet be accommodated in the form of knowledge, zones which feel much more wild than that. There’s a beautiful ...”

“... declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the 20,000 pounds reward (from Parliament in London) for the discovery of the longitude.’ In other words, Harrison had invented the technology for ...”

“... the boat, the throbbing strings-and-percussion sound of wind and water on the move, came back to me as an old, deep pleasure. But a pleasure tinged, as always, with an edge of incipient panic.’ One of Raban’s epigraphs comes from Conrad’s The Shadow Line: ‘ “That’s a funny piece of water,” said Captain Hamilton.’ He has many other matters to ...”

“... that Yeats’s occult belief passes into his social and political beliefs. It is quite unfair of me to wish that Professor Hough had said something about this. That would have meant a different and much longer book. Nevertheless, I wish it. The wish is almost gratified by Cairns Craig. He does not write with the clarity and panache of Graham Hough and his ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”

“... best medics as a sovereign cure for scurvy. Cook reported that Priestley’s water worked. When Mr J.J. Schweppe set up his mineral water firm in London in 1793, he copied Priestley’s recipe, suitably modified for reliable mass production. So what if Priestley had gone to Tahiti and Tonga with Cook, then met his end in an incautious encounter while ...”

“... accounts of enlightened enquiry. Unlike Dava Sobel’s popular caricature of the clockmaker John Harrison, for example, Pancaldi’s carefully characterised Volta was not a solitary persecuted genius hunting the solution to the great scientific problem of his time. Other equally ludicrous fables of the progress of science and technology tell us ...”

“... he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former ...”

“... grand reopening, two of its former bosses filed conflicting accounts of its recent history. Both John Tooley (1970-88) and Jeremy Isaacs (1988-97) describe the House’s considerable achievements over the past half-century; and Isaacs’s part in pushing through the magnificent rebuilding was heroic. What we still want to know is why things also went so ...”

“... There are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian background, but their poetry isn’t usually interested in doing so – not at its most characteristic and not to an extent that would make the term ‘working-class poet’ a useful one ...”

“... Illustration surely means just illustrating the image before you, not inventing it.’ Martin Harrison, the editor of the Bacon catalogue raisonné currently in preparation, has produced a scrapbook of illustrational materials from Bacon’s studio floor, among them dog-eared pages torn from magazines, newspaper cuttings with rusty paper clips still ...”