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“... him a sizable audience. The Nightfisherman, a selection of Graham’s letters by his friends Michael and Margaret Snow, with 19 poems, photographs, drawings and his essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, is the most useful and revealing book on the poet yet published and sets out the clearest record of his ...”

“... always loved nettles, and only now learned of their usefulness. Confined to Bed Angina days, blue snow, time tucked away in cut-out arches, time is blue, time is snow, red sleeves, black hat, time is a yellow woman. Angina days, Swiss, blue Devon, black Cambrium, commedia dell’arte time, slipper red and Silurian red, wall ...”

“... below me – the presumed foundations, whichever of God’s creatures left their prints in the snow and didn’t turn aside, the taped felt undercarpet worn down by unknowns and by the organist of Chelmsford Cathedral – but I bring into it Trevor from downstairs, security guard at HMV and abject night-time guitarist, tapping his foot into a pile of ...”

“... him, and he travels westward in the story’s visionary conclusion to do battle with the shade of Michael Furey. Snow is ‘general over Ireland’ while he does so; not only here, but in Muldoon’s last collection Hay, the colour white functions as a motif of death. One of Louis MacNeice’s best-known poems is about ...”

“... Until you came across the unimaginable – The frame of a motorbike (and a side-car’s) Hidden by snow and heather up a hill Near Ullapool, a twenties Blackburn of course, Skeleton recognising skull, and soul A monkey’s soul amalgamated with ...”

“... Even the avalanches are controlled, as we are informed several times: small explosions shift the snow around. ‘They know what they are doing,’ the father insists, reassuring his family. The snag is that they don’t, quite – and nor does he. An avalanche comes too close to a terrace where hotel guests are eating; everyone is afraid. The screen goes ...”

“... and strange, with a sister’s disdain, or a grandmother’s folded smile. Confiteor for Michael Krüger I heard something out by the gate and went to look. Dead of night; new snow, the larch woods filling slowly, stars beneath the stars. A single cry it was, or so it seemed, though nothing I had recognised as ...”

“... seem permanent, and ours; before it disappears, I will have named all we can see, from here to the snow on Kvannfjellet, the yarrow in the grass, a passing swan, eider and black-backed gull at the rim of the sound. I gloss uncertainties – this lime green weed that fetches up a yard above the tide; those seabirds in the channel, too far out to call for ...”

“... power. Returning to bombed Warsaw in 1940: ‘The cactuses on the balcony were covered in snow. Under the snow they were green but they collapsed like punctured balloons when the snow was removed.’ That seems to me to be worth pages and pages of description and ...”

“... At the time of his death in July of last year, C.P. Snow was working on this book. Its theme is the two-faced gift of physics and its applications, and of those who in not much over a generation have changed our world. Although he had completed only a first draft, his publishers have done well to let us have the book, for it is Snow at his best ...”

“... probably written in 1955, which concentrates so firmly on its unmetaphorical snow that it is hard for us to think of anything else. But then it’s hard too not to think of the several different histories the snow invites us to imagine. What does snow have to do with ...”

“... were finished, speaking of himself, as late as 1915, as ‘a beginner who can’t begin’. Edward Snow, in his Introduction to Uncollected Poems, calls this ‘sheer mythologising’, and reminds us that Rilke wrote poems prolifically and all the time – ‘in letters, in guest books, in presentation copies, and above all in the notebooks he always carried ...”

“... Hungarian Gypsy music and dragged his male guests out to gaze at the moon while pissing in the snow.In the early Cold War years, ex-communist scientists were especially useful to the propaganda campaign. Haldane kept quiet, simply not renewing his Party card, eventually favouring Gandhian non-violence and moving to India. But others were angrily ...”

“... about the swifts is part of a plan that knits together his quest for the breeding ground of snow geese in North-East Canada and his alternation between dependence on home and an urge to hive off. Having Paul Gallico’s Snow Goose read to him at prep school, rediscovering the novella in a hotel when he was ...”

“... collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night’. She adds: ‘The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.’ They are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be found in the idea of wrongness, which ...”