“... memories of the Wild Hunt, as Falstaff – visibly transfigured by the buck’s horns of Herne the Hunter – is tormented by Mistress Quickly’s Fairy Queen and Pistol’s Hobgoblin. The forest is always liable to appear as the unsettled and unsettling opposite of the urban world, a threatening other whose status as res nullius sets it against the ...”

“... On Hoxton Square, if anyone cares to notice it, is a blue plaque for the local physician, James Parkinson, who identified and described the neurological disease that carries his name. But now, with ever increasing speed, the memory traces of market gardens, madhouses, priories, holy wells, 19th-century radicalism, are being wiped out by the new ...”

“... made by Quaker companies like Barclay’s and Lloyd’s banks, Bryant and May matches, Swan Hunter shipbuilders and Cadbury itself. In Victorian Britain, Quaker businessmen had competitive advantages. Ron Davies, in his biography of George Stephenson (Quakers were early financiers of the railways), talks about a Quaker ‘moral mafia’. In a commercial ...”

“... and top hats, with their horses and hounds. Ridley said he’d never been a rider, let alone a hunter. ‘We’re just jumped-up 18th-century industrialists trying to pretend we’re toffs,’ he said. He was less complimentary than I expected about his ancestors’ capitalistic-oligarchic ways. ‘I don’t think we’re particularly impressive as an ...”

“... sectarian theories and practices.The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics ...”

“... we not rub ourselves with grease and ashes we would not last long.’ We’re not far here from James Fenimore Cooper’s linguistic register in The Last of the Mohicans (‘Are the Hurons dogs, to bear this? Who shall say to the wife of Menowgua that the fishes have his scalp, and that his nation have not taken revenge?’). When Mali’s son Theotiste ...”

“... Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony Garnett, who had been hired by James MacTaggart, producer of the Wednesday Play series, as a story editor and talent scout. Taking advantage of MacTaggart being on holiday, Garnett put sufficient resources into the project to ensure that it would be too expensive to cancel by the time he got ...”

“... exhausted by working, and miserable that she didn’t have enough time to write. She read instead: James, Woolf (‘I shall go better than she. No children until I have done it’) and Lawrence: ‘Why do I feel I would have known & loved Lawrence – how many women must think this and be wrong!’ They had a lot of morning sex.In June 1958, she had her first ...”

“... sometimes to good purposes, sometimes not: ‘laboured and complex but not rich’, says George Hunter of the verse of All’s Well, and he also calls it ‘unfunctional’. However, it is in later work that one finds the most laboured and complex examples. It will be said that the instances I provide come from what might be called post-retirement ...”

“... for him when he returned to make a war movie, The Thin Red Line (1998), which he adapted from James Jones’s novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal. A predatory crocodile slides and slowly sinks into green water to the sound of an ominously sustained chord. Then, over images of a jungle, with sunbeams peering through thick foliage, an unidentified voice ...”

“... sea and back to us as more carbohydrate. The carbon loop used to be closed, and if we had stuck to hunter-gathering and muscle-powered farming, it might have stayed so for ever. Then we found fossil fuels. Marco Polo reported that the Chinese kept warm by burning black stones, but our present energy gluttony has its origins in Abraham Darby’s successful use ...”

“... whose theories of historical development as a universal succession of stages, passing from hunter-gatherer to pastoral to agricultural to commercial forms of society, Scott absorbed from Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart and mapped onto his re-creation of the conflicts between Highlands and Lowlands, clan and capital, in Waverley and its sequels. It was ...”

“... from his voice when he talked of people who were “friends of his”. He was like a big-game hunter, proud of the carcasses, but doomed to have no relationship with the living animal.’When Toby first arrives in London, he is struck bythe scaffold stations. The cheated faces. The change of echo under the bridges. The sky crowding down close like grey ...”

“... he moved his studies to Guy’s Hospital. There he studied under Astley Cooper, a student of John Hunter and like his mentor an insatiable vivisectionist, and served as senior dresser to the ‘cack-handed surgeon’ William Lucas.Keats was recognised as an excellent student and practitioner. But by the time he had earned his apothecary’s licence – at his ...”

“... and organisation?’ But Treacher had pushed past as if she were a lowlier form of autograph hunter. ‘Not important,’ he said, though whether he meant he was not important or that it was not important his name be recorded was not plain. ‘I’ll put you under “and many other friends”,’ she had called after him, though in fact he had never met ...”