“... The door slides shut with a hiss and it seems we’re moving out     falteringly at first, the brick     flats tilting then     reluctantly shifting aside. We’re starting a long journey with half the plot, some of the story, nothing to worry about and hardly a clue.     Now a canal’s rotating slowly,     now a sodden paddock, starring     a wrestling girl and boy ...”

“... Pibroch To the make of a piper go seven years of his own learning and seven generations before … At the end of his seven years, one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and lending a fond ear to the drone, he may have parley with old folks of old affairs. Neil Munro, ‘The Lost Pibroch’ We were talking about the hills when the land fell silent ...”

“... Outside, intermitting thunder; habituating      the place of lightning a spectrum flourished      where wire stretched thirty-three years ago,      just broken through – rust;      a pair of massive wedge-tailed eagles flew towards each other then counter-circled,      creating a cylindrical reservoir, a dead zone.      The unsolved beacon, an avatar, prodigious interlude,      oxidation: here,      twenty-three years ago you walked in pitch black, sensing salmon gum boundaries, gravel gutters,      tinge of cold heat      buried in fenceline; distantly, the crossroads, and a single intermittent light flashing –      less than flashing, blinking dully – a compulsion      driving the heart rate      up, a languid attraction, low and tremulous ...”

“... Why, we must dye it then – Would I like to stay here indefinitely? We have trees to prune, cryptograms to decode, it was all a blind running into the light – She couldn’t say the word for ‘fish’. Nor are his genes undone by what oafish submarines remain. Aye, sir, Captain Nemo, sir, we’ve spotted the junk in the roads up ahead. What! That spasm I created for my own diversion, now it’s clearly emerging out of the octopus drool that so long enshrouded it, while I, a nether spur to its district railway, am overrun with coughing doubt for the duration, yet here I must stand, a seeming enigma ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... A Linnet It crossed the road so as to avoid having to greet me. ‘Poor thing but mine own,’ I said, ‘without a song the day would never end.’ Warily the thing approached. I pitied its stupidity so much that huge tears began to well up in my eyes, falling to the hard ground with a plop. ‘I don’t need a welcome like that,’ it said. ‘I was ready for you ...”

“... More Feedback The passionate are immobilised. The case-hardened undulate over walls of the library, in more or less expressive poses. The equinox again, not knowing whether to put the car in reverse or slam on the brakes at the entrance to the little alley. Seasons belong to others than us. Our work keeps us up late nights; there is no more joy or sorrow than in what work gives ...”

“... The trick is to create a world from nothing – not the sound a blackbird makes in drifted leaves; not dogwood or the unexpected scent of jasmine by the west gate not the clouds reflected in these puddles all around the bowling-green deserted after rain and darker than an early Polaroid – but nothing which is present in the flesh as ripeness is: a lifelong urgency ...”

“... For Lucas Morning; the usual walk to the harbour: the tide half-out the fat mud fretted with bird-prints light slurred with oil and slicked reflections ice white or coffee brown strawberry red or a blue that never arrives at daylight. We are here so you can name the world you know one object at a time: fishing boat, lighthouse, herring gull, open sky, those shoals of fish that skirt the harbour walls searching for food a work you never tire of watching as they break in hungry waves against the weed ...”

“... of the condition by American novelists are surprisingly rare. One of the most vivid comes from John Updike’s Bech is back, the second of his books to deal with the American writer’s life through the alter ego of unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech, here attending a party: Like a fuzzy sock being ejected by the tumble drier there was flung towards ...”

“... espionage worlds, and subsequently in business journalism. Unlike Fleming’s previous biographer John Pearson, Donald McCormick makes no attempt to psychologise his subject – or to reproduce the fluency which made Pearson’s book read as easily as a James Bond thriller. His justification is to produce, among much that is already familiar, some new ...”

“... a repetition of Hammett’s account, via the character of Casper Gutman, of the Hospitalers of St John – the purpose of which, it seems, is to allow Layman to observe that, contrary to what Hammett/Gutman says, the Hospitalers refused to move from Rhodes to Malta and were given four islands by Charles V, not three. There are some crime novelists (Raymond ...”

“... and eight buddies. I suppose the world’s two most famous Scientologists, apart of course from John Travolta and the late L. Ron himself, were in town for the premières of their respective new movies. Or perhaps this was just another symptom of the reinvention of London as the hippest, most happening, furthest-molecule-forward-on-the-cutting-edge city ...”

“... Beyond Albany and Syracuse …’ As handwriting sprawls a page, revealing much about the writer’s psyche, so too these lemons, dividends of peace, in our time, my friend. Don’t stagger the bejesus out of the old harness, play with the dog, who yaps afresh at any pretext of the blond air, or stifle the air’s partisans, the moments. Hard to pin down when the motorcade stopped before your house ...”