“... and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.’ Unlike the fish and bird die-offs that Carson investigated, the steep decline of global biodiversity, much of it in the last fifty years, is not a mystery. Human activity has led to the stripmallification of nature: complex forest ecosystems are cleared to make way for fields of a ...”

“... with a sprinkling of other Catholics. Making his way on personal magnetism, ‘he could charm a bird out of a tree’, a friend recalled. For years he had been attracted to Rose Fitzgerald, according to Nasaw ‘the most famous and surely one of the prettiest Catholic girls in the city’, though even the loyal Perry admits that ‘her Boston accent, and ...”

“... staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental ...”

“... John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the novel was published, Longman’s Magazine published ‘The Persons of the Tale’, in which Captain Smollett and Long John Silver step out of the narrative after the 32nd chapter to have a chat ‘in an open place not far from the story ...”

“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”

“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”

“... poets especially have been very keen on remembering what they haven’t done. I’m thinking of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the unrealised walk in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked ...”

“... lash to and fro like a dog shaking a rat. Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It’s more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the ...”

“... tweed cap and a lilac chiffon scarf, allowed me to sit in his studio while he painted a flying bird.’ That self-conscious reduction to a few dazzling elements is typical of Chatwin’s affectation, and it was certainly a mannerism in the books, but only a fool or a hostile witness – Craig Raine appears to be one or the other – would preen himself for ...”

“... of ‘places’ to visit in her mind. First up is the garden at the Haworth parsonage:The mute bird sitting on the stone,The dank moss dripping from the wall,The garden-walk with weeds o’ergrownI love them – how I love them all!These lines prospect methodically, inching forward through parallelism and internal rhyme until they have identified the exact ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet James Merrill and the British novelists Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, she fled town as soon as she could, muttering that she wasn’t made for this kind of thing. She seems to have cut a formidable figure. ‘Mary Renault arrived all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple ...”

“... the mill, devious bard, thief of nature, false traitor, devil’s progeny, tallow filling, gallows bird, give up, you’re defeated!) This multiplicity of voices does owe something to Chaucer, the arch-ventriloquist of the Canterbury Tales, but Dunbar prefers to stick with one voice, or a small number of voices, in relatively short poems rather than embark on ...”

“... of them, or that Sisyphus had been mysteriously involved with Odysseus’ mother, that the first bird to abduct Ganymede was not an eagle but a swan, or that beloved Iolaus was also popular in Etruria, under the name of Vile. By the same measure, some of the myths we had come to see as central and important – the ‘invention’ of sacrifice, the theft of ...”