“... the snake is a snake; but the toad has a human face, in the hidden gallery under the roof, where the masons practised their art, away from the bishops and kings. We’ve seen this much before (in Salisbury, say, or that chapel above the Esk at Rosslyn): a refuge for the pagan in the chill of Christendom, a Green Man in the fabric of the stone; a running boar; the sacred hare; or else the common wren, so lifelike it might flit at any time into a corner, tail erect, the eye agleam, as if to indicate its known propensity for lust (which, in the old tongue, meant no more than pleasure: no-one’s shame and not a sin, but life as such, immediate and true like flight, or song ...”

“... At My Father’s Funeral The idea that the body as well as the soul was immortal was probably linked on to a very primitive belief regarding the dead, and one shared by many peoples, that they lived on in the grave. This conception was never forgotten, even in regions where the theory of a distant land of the dead was evolved, or where the body was consumed by fire before burial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hoodwinked by the flat-lining, inside out Silver lining of every absent cloud, A clear day halo, a vulcanised rout Of dust and eucalypt, diesels and loud Stereos hyping up an eager crowd: Addendum to truck and trailer, it rears Up and contorts, hydraulically proud, Eyes in the back of the head, cobra peers Out into the hills and paddocks: it fears Less with each scream ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be the home for the creators of Harry Potter, Inspector Rebus and Grand Theft Auto? What would John Knox have ...”

“... prolific: nobody could begin to say how many thousands of his pictures have survived, and how John Bonehill, the curator of this exhibition, decided on his final selection I can’t imagine. Sandby was also enormously versatile: he worked in watercolour, bodycolour (gouache) and oil, he etched, he was the first professional artist in Britain to work in ...”

“... in my copy Martin Amis’s Introduction doesn’t precede but actually replaces the Foreword by John Ray Jr, PhD, Nabokov’s taunting impersonation of a suavely clueless psychiatrist. It’s as if an editor looked at the book and thought, we don’t need this John Ray geezer – Martin Amis is much more famous ...”

“... The dominant ideas were principally extracted from the pontifical utterances of ‘sages’, in John Holloway’s expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold. The team-written Wellesley Index project went on from this quest to anatomise the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent ...”

“... 1955-6 at Caltech, as a graduate student in physics. This was the period when the recently formed John Birch Society was active in San Marino, a mile or two away from the Caltech campus. Pierce was evidetly much impressed by a Birchite novel circulating at the time, The Franklin Papers, whose plot anticipates The Turner Diaries. Both novels derive from Jack ...”

“... and perhaps not all of them – could ever bear to read. Defoe always fancied himself a poet. John Richetti notes that he wrote more lines of verse than either Milton or Dryden, though it is now almost all forgotten. ‘To some extent, that is a shame,’ Richetti observes, not quite believing that he is putting right a wrong. The best of Defoe’s poetry ...”

“... There is no evidence that Rimbaud ever visited Scarborough. Graham Robb At times, it feels like someone else’s dream, copious rain, when it comes, and the sense of Paraclete in every tongue of flame and hymnsong in the sky above the fen; and nightfall, in the gaps between the hills, is quick and unrelenting, like the mouth that glides out from the ditch, no voice to tell what symmetry it brings ...”