“... settled that, they swore an oath of secrecy, and received communion at a Mass said by the Jesuit John Gerard, who was in the next room: they presumably understood this as turning their undertaking into a religious vow and conjoining them in sacred solidarity. The first part of the scheme went with absurd facility. The conspirators rented some lodgings which ...”

“... in the Suburbs’,* the genius of this style of gardening was the great horticulturalist John Claudius Loudoun (a road in St John’s Wood is named after him), who in 1838 published his Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion. Loudoun’s idea was the ‘gardenesque’, and his rhetorical style, very much in the mode ...”

“... all to itself in the National Gallery; but I doubt if anyone has gone into it so pertinaciously as John North. North is an expert in the history of astronomy and mathematics, so naturally his view of the painting emerges from the jumble, which he does not regard as a jumble, of astronomical and time-telling instruments sitting on top of the carpet-covered ...”

“... for Will Maclean I House If the house in a dream is how I imagine myself: room after room of furniture no one could use; stairs leading upwards to nothing; an empty hall filling with snow where a door has been left ajar; then whatever I make of the one room high in the roof where something alive and frantic is hopelessly trapped, whatever I make of the sweetness it leaves behind on waking, what I know and cannot tell is awkward and dark in my hands while I stop to remember the snare of a heart; the approximate weight of possession ...”

“... The Ugly I love you as I love the Hatchetfish, the Allmouth, the Angler, the Sawbelly and Wolf-eel, the Stoplight Loosejaw, the Fangtooth; all our sweet bathypelagic ones, and especially those too terrible or sly even for Latin names; who saddle their menfolk to the vagina’s hide like scorched purses, stiff with seed; whom God built to trawl endless cathedrals of darkness, their bland eyes gaping like wounds; who would choke down hunger itself, had it pith and gristle enough; who carry on their foreheads the trembling light of the world ...”

“... St Hubert and the Deer He has come to a halt in the woods: snow on the path                and everything gone to ground in its silken lair; gone to ground              or folded in a death so quiet, he can almost taste the fade of hair and vein, the flesh gone into light and water          part-song                   lost in all this glister ...”

“... The body as the sum of all nostalgias. Empire of footfalls; Mother as Script and Ideal – and love no chance event, no accidental stir of wings, or blueprint spiked with hospice. What hymn tunes come to mind at Candlemas, the fence wires rimmed with ice, our plum trees medieval in the first blue gloaming? What carol for the kill-site, sodden plumage scattered in the grass, and beautiful? Always, the meadow is now: the chill after dusk, hunter and hunted pausing in the fog to listen, summer barbering the skin ...”

“... Aubade(In memoriam J.P.)Morning in lockdown. Shadows in the yard,Quink-blue and graduallyshifting, like those eels we used to seeabove the weir, thickwhipcords of lustand instinct, surgingheadlong through the mystery of grass.Forty years on, but all I have to dois close my eyes to see youcycling to Cherry Hinton in that dust-greyskirt you used to wear, the dawn lightfollowing the river back to town– and every summerproximate, since then,though you were gonebefore the mist set inand anyway, it wasn’t what we thought:the true romancewas place, the faintcontinuum of rainon Byron’s Pool, the passingmoment, when an owl skimmed overheadand left me here, yearslater, half a mileof buddleia and birdsong to the nearesttraffic, threadsof damp along the walls,but warmer than the house I thoughtwould shield me: first sunstreaming through the trees,no I, no us, but just beyond the fence,a skylark in the near field, flush with song ...”

“... The movement slows: everything grows dark. A man checks the knot in his tie. It’s twilight and a fine rain smears the windows. Will you miss your train, and the delightful party? A man checks the knot in his tie. It’s twilight; superhuman powers will never be yours. You will miss your train, and the delightful party. They argue about civil rights ...”

“... Down by the River El muro cano Va a imponerme su ley, no su accidente.          Jorge Guillén She dies in a local flurry of dismay as kittens do, held steady in a pail of icy water, never what I intended, more a case of inattentiveness than grief or rage, I held her in the current, fingers wound with shift and slither. It wasn’t personal ...”

“... Die Musik bei einem Hochzeitszug erinnert mich immeran die Musik von Soldaten, die in den Krieg ziehen. Heine June will continue white, with outbreaks of rice; though, given the numbers, it’s difficult not to assume that one of these persons now present will soon take the cure in a series of high-ceilinged rooms that was once The Merchant’s House, at the heart of an Alpine town near Zermatt, a resort so exclusive it even had two names ...”

“... Millpoint throaty guzzler, wishful choker as dust films throat, to measure up, squalls with hooks and introversions, bale-hooks, moebius comeback though sharp and sliced from the same stretch, to hang up or catch skin to ripen blood-eating earth, so sharp needles of rain crosscut, score soil and tease seeds, to calibrate the empty out and add up, it says enough but penetration’s not there and lateral spread, its absorption which is not a formula of depth, width, impact, even with the resistance, the failure of soil to wet, taken into consideration ...”

“... The linguist Ole Stig Andersen was keen to seek out the remaining traces of a West Caucasian language called Ubykh. Having heard that there was one remaining speaker he set out to find the man and arrived in his village on 8 October 1992. The man had died a few hours earlier. At times, in those last few months, he would think of a word and he had to remember the tree, or the species of frog, the sound denoted: the tree itself, or the frog, or the state of mind and not the equivalent word in another language, the speech that had taken his sons and the mountain light; the graves he swept and raked; the wedding songs ...”

“... When I was twenty years old, on days that were darker and brighter than now, I got up at six and swam fifty lengths every morning, steady and even, though not as precise, or as sure as the one other swimmer I passed, flowing back and forth, in the lit pool on Parker’s Piece: an old man, I thought at the time, with a gold to his skin that is only acquired over decades, his slicked hair silver, his bachelor’s eyes halfway from grey to blue, when we met in the changing rooms, silent and male, but never so much that it bothered him not to conceal a fleeting, and half-amused gleam of fellow feeling ...”

“... Over the mountain they vacillate. Not quite flies over dung – the mountain is too good for that. And flies land – these hover, and resist landing as long as possible. They need the mountain to stay up there – in their bullshit freedom, coming down as far away from their launch place as they can. Setting club records. Causing distress to old men in fields and kids alone in farmhouses when their cellphones are out of range ...”