“... in its wounded and brilliant malignancy, his own young wife and her lover into the Brenda Last and John Beaver of A Handful of Dust. It had been essential for Waugh to transmute what had gone on and what had not gone on during that brief marriage into what John Cowper Powys would call his ‘Life Illusion’: the sense of ...”

“... Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, was launched in the optimistic Sixties (the late John Butt was associated with both initiatives). As in previous volumes, about half the letters (here they number 247) are hitherto unpublished, and of the rest many are now published for the first time in their full form. There are the inevitable routine and ...”

“... by the sight of potato-sellers whipping their asses in the street; he visits the theatre to see John Henderson play Falstaff; he takes his family down the Thames to Vauxhall Gardens. He also studies the newspapers, intrigued most of all by the doings of high society. His outraged account of the Gordon Riots of 1780 (‘the worse than Negro barbarity of the ...”

“... his hair is flecked with grey. He asks me my name and I tell him. ‘I want you to change my bail, John. Change it. No more reporting, yeah.’ Reporting at a police station is a common bail condition imposed by the courts. ‘Will you accept anything else?’ ‘Anything, John, yeah. Just lift that one. Get that one done ...”

“... In hospital it’s earlier than you think. All day the daylight lighting lights the day That five times brings by trolley a hot drink, Bovril, Nescafé, Ovaltine, or tea. The nurses’ busy heels don’t tap but squish; The nurses wheedle, pummel, scream, and lay A sort of sealed-up dish Five times or so a day the beds beside: Uncouth but shapely, made from rhino hide (Or so it looks ...”

“... Learning to Talk This is our game for now, rehearsing words to make the world seem permanent, and ours; before it disappears, I will have named all we can see, from here to the snow on Kvannfjellet, the yarrow in the grass, a passing swan, eider and black-backed gull at the rim of the sound. I gloss uncertainties – this lime green weed that fetches up a yard above the tide; those seabirds in the channel, too far out to call for sure; these unspecific moths; a chequered wagtail, similar enough, though different, to those we know at home ...”

“... Flying up a valley in the Alps where the rock rushes past like a broken diorama I’m struck by an acute feeling of precision – the way the wing-tips flex, just a little as the German crew adjust the tilt of the sky and bank us all into a minor course correction while the turbo-props gulp at the mist with their old-fashioned thirsty thunder – or you notice how the hostess, perfecting a smile as she offers you a dozen drinks, enacts what is almost a craft: Technical Drawing, for example, a subject where desire and function, in the hands of a Dürer, can force a thousand fine ink lines to bite into the doubts of an epoch, spelling Humanism ...”

“... My son is learning insects – woodlouse bee a line of ants a lone fritillary. He finds them on a flagstone or a leaf and quizzes them the start of dialogue and so commencement of the soul’s unfolding self-invention in a world that shifts and turns but really has no end and surely what we mean by soul is something no anatomist could find: a total sum of movement and exchange how winter starts along an empty street the first snow flaring dark into the light a parents’ conversation overheard between the gold of wireless and the green of solstice or the lamp I used to see across the valley thirty years ago defined by darkness and defining night ...”

“... thing, start doing poetry and prose that is nothing but ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. This is what John Fuller’s new rhymes for children are: they announce their literariness and children can no doubt admire it, for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who said, “Peacock ...”

“... Tim has been filed in Yellow Faction at school. He is frustrated and angry: he wants to be in Red Faction, especially for the Cross Country, which even five-year-olds train for in the Bush. Character building. Robust. Preparatory. I take him out to the garden where I have piled the spent broad bean stalks, grey ropes of pea vines, dead clumps of wild oats, for a quick burning-off ...”

“... This killing will never stop.                    It’s not enough to slay the beast, he has to make it clear how calm his loathing is, how utterly devoid of fellow feeling; and though she is present, the woman is incidental; whatever he hoped in the past, he’s not here, now, for the wet of her mouth on his skin, or his curdled hands tangling in the spilt folds of her gown ...”

“... We were driving along at twenty-five miles an hour. ‘Desperate’ wants to know how the angle tree has went. Or we now can live over a wombat factory, said the woman coming in to see him about something. And I was like, a beautiful little tree, or lake. Just the sandwiches now, we’ll look at the rest later when you’re out of time … Oh yeah? Oh, yeah ...”

“... The Goofiad Um, it wasn’t my project to prise them apart. Pale Jessica had come full circle. Case in point: she spelled one application under presidential law. How it became one of the names one can’t recall. But on the other hand good old people watch the convention. It’s guaranteed, and not be president. People had yet to live and believe your own cameras which it probably isn’t going to, picking up the same thing ...”

“... Only​ those who actively dislike poetry didn’t like him. The others could care less. There were too many other things to worry about, like is my licence expired yet? Fortunately there were a few in-between, those who school themselves to take an interest in everything, which is not to say they’re not truly, deeply interested in the things that matter most ...”

“... Space programs/screwbean mesquite/barrel cactus Ecoregion/section/tract         The intricacies of a desert         lawncare business,         ‘Quarter million a year’         says José Luis, carefully,         two cylinders of rolled lawn         harnessed to his flatbed.         I took them for lumber         till I saw him truck them through the car-wash         which procedure         so he told me         he repeated every hundred miles ...”