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“... newspapers.* Last summer? Well, that problem was solved last week when the Gospel according to St John, all 1300 pages of it, beat the dust out of the doormat. It is a sure sign that spring is in the air when Wisden arrives. While there is a good twelve months browse therein, one flick through is enough to stir the brain cells. It is the cricketer’s holy ...”

“... after the Whitemoor escape, the Home Secretary asked a former Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir John Woodcock, ‘to enquire into the circumstances of the escape and to recommend any action that should be taken to avoid any recurrence’. Within a month of the Report’s publication, matters in the Prison Service were very much worse. Frederick ...”

“... These measures will probably reappear in new legislation. Lord Walney (formerly the Labour MP John Woodcock, now a crossbench peer) claimed that the protest clauses in the Bill were ‘designed to protect the primacy of our democracy’. How odd, then, that they were not in the version put before the democratically elected Commons. Instead, the ...”

“... who is a working peer. The only leading official to whom the Prime Minister talks regularly is John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, who shares something of his political approach and whom he usually sees discreetly, rather than for talks heralded by the TUC. Union leaders have had, perforce, to get used to a vastly diminished status – though none of ...”

“... 18 June, 0 335 10580 7), Remembering Orwell, compiled by Stephen Wadhams, introduced by George Woodcock (Penguin, 227 pp., £2.95, 27 September, 0 14 007458 9), Nineteen Eighty-Four and All’s Well? by Tom Winnifrith and William Whitehead (Macmillan, 104 pp., £15 and £5.95, 4 April, 033 33493 0), Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Secker, new ...”

“... and, simultaneously, the man who was Traven first moved tentatively out of the shadows. When John Huston set about filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1946, he woke one morning to see a small man standing in his Mexican hotel room, offering a card which introduced him as Hal Croves, Traven’s trusted agent. Croves worked for Huston as an ...”

“... Eagar says he always hoped his pictures would be the illustrations to go with what he read in John Woodcock’s reports for the Times and what he heard in the radio commentary of John Arlott. On Midsummer’s Day in 1975, Clive Lloyd captained the West Indies team to victory at Lord’s in the first one-day world ...”

“... seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... postwar England. The manuscript had been rejected by several more literal-minded publishers before John Lehmann, the editor of New Writing, took it on at the recommendation of his assistant, Julia Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s niece. So it was as a literary work, with a lingering glow of Bloomsbury behind it, that David’s first book made its appearance. To ...”

“... The last years of Fuller’s life saw an extraordinary outpouring of poems. His son, the poet John Fuller, aware of the great quantity already published in his father’s declining years, was surprised to find a posthumous mass of additional typescripts. Last Poems,* selected by John Fuller from this cache, includes an ...”

“... for although the subject is generally a grey one some of the characters – Brown, Castle, Wilson, Woodcock, Jones – had colour and some of the events contained high drama. The book does not quite do justice to the sense of desperate exasperation which overcame everyone I know – including Sir Denis – who was obliged during those years to grapple with the ...”

“... hunting, and makes of it a daredevil and jovial business; next comes the sporty slaughter of many woodcock and pheasants. The Irish aristocracy acts true to type in this study, down to the display of eccentricities, which enables the author to assemble a good collection of anecdotes and bon mots. One Edwardian Co. Cork lady, for instance, was in the habit of ...”

“... to lead their own lives. When, later, he was one of the five ministers selected to check whether John Profumo was lying about his relationship with Christine Keeler, Macleod distinguished himself by avoiding his colleagues’ ponderous circumlocutions. ‘Look, Jack,’ he said, ‘the basic question is: “Did you fuck her?” ’ Sadly, Profumo continued ...”