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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... could and should depend upon keeping the past alive on its own terms. The valuable thing about John Williams’s book on Wordsworth’s poetry and politics is the way it accepts, perhaps without meaning to, the historicity of its subject, and examines it with a care and insight that are not in the least concerned with our own contemporary needs and ...”

“... Harnforth? Mr Tim Harnforth?’ One and Last Love is Mr Tim Harnforth’s novel as well as Mr John Braine’s. An authorial confidence informs us that it was originally conceived with more melodramatic action to it. The hero was to find himself stricken with a terminal disease and be forced to a climax of love and death. But instead, the novelist was ...”

“... The psychologist John Layard – ‘Loony Layard’, as he is affectionately termed in one of Auden’s early poems – is said to have told a submarine officer that he had grown a beard as a masculine protest against the mechanical womb he inhabited. And in Portrait of the Artist a young man informs his friend that he admires, the Venus de Milo because her broad hips show she would be good at bearing his children ...”

“... You and I, when our days are done, must say Without exactly saying it, goodbye. If we could choose at such a time one free Embodiment which might, by being the last, Stand in the account somehow as one Generous entry putting the whole in credit, What and where would it be, that final choice? There are times such as when we have had them Must serve in their completeness for the fancy, For they are all we get ...”

“... Remembering the story of a man who left the village one bright afternoon, wandering out in his shirt-sleeves and never returning, I walk in this blur of heat to the harbour wall, and sit with my hands in my pockets, gazing back at painted houses, shopfronts, narrow roofs, people about their business, neighbours, tourists, the gaunt men loading boats with lobster creels, women in hats and coats, despite the sun, walking to church and gossip ...”

“... 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 ...”