“... Taxonomy Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78) Weeks out of school: in rainstorms and grandmothers’ cupboards, bear-dark in the corners, filigrees of lacewing and silt; the birds we saw in books: merganser, stork; trees from botanic gardens printed on air; the words in our minds like games that would never be finished: names for moments at sea; or how a skin is altered by a history of shade: the smallest shift enough to fix a thing or make it new: soft or more evenly mottled; bearing scars and hairless; or defined for centuries by how it seemed emerging from the earth: fragile dicotyledon smudged with ash, not sixty feet of constituted rain ...”

“... All the misfortunes of man, all the baleful reverses with which histories are filled … all of this is the result of not knowing how to dance. Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme We listen to the late weather-bulletin. The forecast is for severe storms, resulting in spires and chimneys being blown down on top of those citizens who venture out of doors to post letters to relations serving sentences in Her Majesty’s prisons ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a powerful comic novelist. Kington Aimes must look to his laurels. The circumstances surrounding John Kennedy Toole’s fictions are as pure American Gothic as even Flannery O’Connor could devise. Without any of his friends suspecting he had authorial ambitions, Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in the early Sixties, while doing his national service in ...”

“... like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers.’ Instead of which he is the ‘King of Horror’ who had his face on ...”

“... They Knew What They Wanted They all kissed the bride. They all laughed. They came from beyond space. They came by night. They came to a city. They came to blow up America. They came to rob Las Vegas. They dare not love. They died with their boots on. They shoot horses, don’t they? They go boom. They got me covered. They flew alone. They gave him a gun ...”

“... On the Fairytale Ending Begin with the fend-for-yourself of all the loves you learned about in story books; fish-scale and fox-print graven on the hand forever   and a tiny hook-and-eye unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart you thought would never grieve or come undone. May; and already it’s autumn: broken gold and crimson in the medieval beechwoods, where our shadows come and go, no darker than the figures in a book of changes, till they’re hexed and singled out for something chill and slender in this world, more sleight-of-hand than sorrow or safekeeping ...”

“... Orange The heaven of childhood had something to do with citrus: back in the coal towns, deep in a season of rain, or out on the farm roads, away from the dangerous world, where children came down from their attics, with sleep in their mouths, light on the kitchen walls on a Christmas morning and, under the tree, in their scarlet and matt-black wrappers, the newborn clementines that flaked and scaled like moths’ or angels’ wings between our fingers, then melted to pulp and a liquor that darkened our palms with the colour and scent of Jesus, raised from the dead and walking alone in the garden, untouched by the future, the light of the world returned, as he raises his hand to gather a fruit from the darkness and taste, once again, the blood-orange sap, the sweet at the heart of the bitter ...”

“... Beholding As dawn moves in from the firth I’m sitting up awake, a mug of tea fogging the window, the bones of my hands and face shot with insomnia’s delicate, lukewarm needles. You’re still asleep. Your hair is the colour of whey and your hand on the pillow is clenched, like a baby’s fist on a figment of heat, or whatever you’ve clutched in a dream, and I suddenly want to ask your forgiveness for something deliberately cruel in the way I see, in the way all seeing could become: too hard, too clear, refusing to find something more than the cool light of morning ...”

“... Shoes Once Shod in a Blacksmith’s Shop Shoes once shod in a blacksmith’s shop rust on hooves lying on the rough edge            of a paddock, horse skeletons mingle with broken hoppers & elevators & the iron-ringed wheels of surface strippers –            sprouted grain thick on the ground, like chemically stimulated hair ...”

“... The Love Interest We could see it coming from forever, then it was simply here, parallel to that day’s walking. By then it was we who had disappeared, into the tunnel of a book. Rising late at night, we join the current of tomorrow’s news. Why not? Unlike some others, we haven’t anything to ask for or borrow. We’re just pieces of solid geometry: cylinders or rhomboids ...”

“... to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour. Once it was Sir John Squire and Edward Shanks – obviously the most significant and influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame ...”

“... is anything to go by, but it gave her no confidence. Finally she took up with a young Dutchman, John Lenglet, who came from a background as respectable as her own, though he was already married, to an actress, and was still not divorced when he and Jean celebrated their bigamous wedding in The Hague in 1919. Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight doesn’t like ...”

“... last he exclaimed: ‘I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman, at Oxford.’ ‘I am John Henry Newman,’ the lady replied, raising her veil to show the well-known face. The touchingly beautiful and moving end of Newman’s poem, ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, is a perfect ...”

“... with haunted admiration the deceptively innocent lyrical outpourings from his Devonshire vicarage. John Donne, the greatest of the deans of St Paul’s, inevitably ranks first in the list of Anglican clergy (he has seven mentions), but he was dedicated to the theme of death and slept in his coffin – besides, he wrote poetry, a genre which is given an unfair ...”