“... This, as he is well aware, is what Whitman was prescribing when he urged the poet not to be meddlesome, but to allow experience to go from the composition without a shred of the composition. Whitman’s word for this is ‘candour’. For Gregory Corso, Karl Shapiro and Gary Snyder, poets of the San Francisco renaissance, the need was for a poetry ...”

“... most compelling contest so far has been the one between the vice-presidential candidates. Watched by nearly 20 million more people than the first McCain/Obama debate, viewers switched on in the hope or fear of witnessing one or other of the candidates go down in flames. For a while, the most intriguing aspect of the first debate was whether it would happen at ...”

“... This election year​ will be remembered as the one in which two candidates rallied the indignation of millions against the establishment. Both Trump and Sanders actually call it that. The reflexive response of the establishment – proof of its existence, if you needed proof – has been its uniform portrayal of the two ...”

“... To paraphrase​ Roland Barthes, hats are worn to be seen and to be read. They are signs of who we are or want to be. Because hats, unlike shoes or coats, are worn near eye-level, they are the first item of apparel offered for view. The stranger approaching from a distance reads the hat before he sees the face or figure and, at a glance, learns a lot about the person beneath it ...”

“... 07’ was the pithy slogan). But once in power, the party discovered it couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him. His disdain for his colleagues, his paranoia, his monomania and his disloyalty proved too much: there was a coup and he was ousted. Then, having dumped him, the party found it needed him back, partly because he was its one proven ...”

“... do they look like? Like a brown and purple cloud-shadow spread out across the uplands, described by William Atkins in characteristically fine focus when he says of the North Yorkshire moors that ‘the new blooms were silverish specks; they were pale grey, beige and mint green. I picked a sprig, but the moor-purple visible from a distance was not a colour ...”

“... poem, novel, film, play, painting, opera or ballet for longer than two paragraphs, and readers can be forgiven for feeling a bit disoriented as they travel to the chapter’s next destination. Hall gives just one page to Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, where W.B. Stanford, in The Ulysses Theme (1954), which Hall cites on her first ...”

“... and often strenuously. He sleeps out, on mountains and moors. He walks arduously, along coasts and by holloways. He has spent months in our wild places from Sutherland and the Outer Hebrides to the extremities of Wales. He visits them, rather than living in them. He goes out of a strong feeling for nature, as a professional observer and writer – one who ...”

“... are as remote as ever. Nineteenth-century democrats knew that having an election every year would be clumsy and time-consuming (the US House of Representatives, which does it every two years, is proof of that). But they thought the alternatives were probably worse. Without regular elections politicians would drift into self-serving cliques that pursued their ...”

“... I never thought I would find myself writing warmly about a book by a Scottish laird. Adam Nicolson owns the Shiant Islands, east of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The Shiants are a compact cluster and, like all small islands, offer the marvellous sense that you can encompass them, you can easily walk or sail round them and get to know each rock-face or sand-bar, each vein of water or peat-hagg lip ...”

“... as an afterthought’. A rash of Tatler imitators gave way to more nationally minded miscellanies by the mid-century, but the first golden age of the Irish magazine was the 1790s. Journals such as Anthologia Hibernica and the Microscope confidently addressed the world of Addisonian Enlightenment and gentlemanly antiquarianism, though pedlars of ...”

“... called out in alarm: a swift had crashed to the ground just outside the back door, struck down by a sparrowhawk: it gave one gasp and died, and I buried it at the end of the garden. Encounters with birds have enriched my life, whether it was the golden eagle spiralling silently upwards a few yards below me in a corrie of Beinn Alligin in Torridon, or a ...”

“... out to fit pretty well with the outcome their models might have predicted. It was always going to be hard for an insider to succeed at the end of a two-term Democratic administration. The Electoral College gave certain in-built advantages to a Republican who was able to pick up votes in the right places. The state of the economy – neither hot nor cold but ...”

“... Chaplin​ had already starred in 41 films before he became an icon, universally recognisable by his appearance, mannerisms and pattern of behaviour. A lot happens in these films, mostly having to do with the hero’s pursuit of basic needs (food, money, sex, status) through the exercise of a kind of flighty, Zen belligerence. In Kid Auto Races at Venice ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”