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“... more than once in his column, ‘The World of Books’. And in a recent issue of the Guardian, Stephen Moss, that paper’s former literary editor, has asked: ‘Why do Rushdie, McEwan, Barnes and Amis still dominate Britain’s literary scene?’ Without so much as a flutter of irony, Moss quotes an anonymous ...”

“... was a fern-owl, and the green woodpecker a woodspite. The history of bird names is the subject of Stephen Moss’s Mrs Moreau’s Warbler. It seems that some common bird names are very ancient indeed. The cuckoo is recorded in England by that name as far back as the 13th century, in the medieval round known as ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’, where it appears ...”

“... on oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky. ‘I see myself as Russia’s true believer,’ he told Stephen Moss a month later in an interview with the Guardian. According to Moss, Browder said that ‘the oligarchs were destroying Russia and that only when Putin came to power did things start to improve – for all the ...”

“... For Pater, physical lust and spiritual ambition are opposites. The other exception is Kate Moss. Consider this description of her by Dennis Freedman, former creative director of the American magazine W: Kate has been our muse – ours and our photographers’ – for the simple reason that there are so many aspects to Kate’s personality. She’s a ...”

“... she might as easily have been a scientist, like her father (an entomologist) or her brother Stephen (an astrophysicist). She shares her father’s despairing ecological awareness, together with her brother’s logically detached interest in the nature of time. Both concerns are evoked in childhood memories of strenuous field trips in the Canadian ...”

“... accompanying podcast series covers plant intelligence, the Amazon pharmacopeia and ecologist Stephen Harding’s concept of ‘Gaia alchemy’, which seeks to access the intelligence of the earth through meditation and shamanic ritual. To address the climate disaster, Harding urges, we first have to heal the split between science and rationality. One of ...”

“... of Bruce Grobelaar and the others at Winchester Crown Court, the judge’s limo drawing past Moss Bros at the end of each day’s proceedings, the flashier barristers chatting up local girls in the wine bars. Maurio wasn’t big on soccer but he liked talking about Princess Diana. He didn’t believe any of the conspiracy theories about her death. ‘The ...”

“... Stephen Leacock, the English-born, Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to illustrate a scientific disquisition ...”

“... substitute, an alternative in spirituality. Quite the reverse. Whitman and James, just as much as Stephen Crane and Hemingway, helped the liberation of American literature into physicality, inspired by but growing away from the Emersonian traditions of Puritan New England. Poe, whom Whitman met when they were fellow editors of small-time papers, was doing the ...”

“... facts, quotations, and recollections like so many stones that are held together only by their moss. Utterly lacking in coherence and consistency, it ranges from lulling gentleness to cruel, sharp insights.’ The Ruin of Kasch is not pure bricolage, however. Calasso may move effortlessly from Pol Pot to Goethe, or from discussion of the Vedas to Richard ...”

“... the remains of a lower wall running up against it, making the corner of a rectangle. I pull away moss and earth, and find a stone-paved floor, the hazel bushes growing up through it. I want it to be a fort or an ancient lookout, in line with the crannog, the tiny island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the ...”

“... Mrs de Quincey withdrew Thomas from the school. The reasons for this are obscure, although Leslie Stephen, in his entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, stresses that she felt Thomas had become ‘vain’ in his learning. It was clearly a damaging thing to do, and may have contributed to de Quincey’s opting, in his mature prose style, for the ...”

“... VI ‘will go into history as the most disastrous my unhappy country has known since Matilda and Stephen’. The new Queen has already been seen in slacks. And the French revenge themselves on their liberators by sending camembert made from United Nations milk powder which turns to chalk and moss without ever ...”

“... and left to fend for yourself. The opening poem of his first collection – privately printed by Stephen Spender in 1928 – sets and upsets the scene:The sprinkler on the lawnWeaves a cool vertigo, and stumps are drawn;The last boy vanishes,A blazer half-on, through the rigid trees.This isn’t quite cricket. We may approve the orderly syllable count, but ...”

“... owned by some individuals without apparently realising that 70 thousand acres of hill and peat moss may not be very profitable investments. The book is more convincing on the concentrations of business power in London, a feature well established since the mid-19th century, and on the well-known system of media chains of ownership. ‘Wealth is very ...”