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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

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

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Before and After After murder, the sleep of murder, its slipways closed, its map unclimbable. But, before that, as a car-door flicks into last year’s Festival, it’s early yet. After a lock clicks, the car relaxes, reflections flicker from shop to shop and most of what he is hangs from his hand. After a balloon, the weight of a child unbalances him and something draws against a hard corner – but before this – ice-cream, bells, a landscape of heifers, mothers leaning across sunlit windshields and, from side to side, nowhere to park, except where bicycles curve their shadows on separate outlines in the grass ...”