“... garden at the Haworth parsonage:The mute bird sitting on the stone,The dank moss dripping from the wall,The garden-walk with weeds o’ergrownI love them – how I love them all!These lines prospect methodically, inching forward through parallelism and internal rhyme until they have identified the exact shape and size of the feeling that originally gave rise ...”

“... and south-west. In one of the chambers a baby’s finger bone was found attached to the south wall above the level of the sediment: the body must have floated for some time when the water level was high, butting and bobbing against the wall as it decomposed.This is one of the many sites associated with Ireland’s ...”

“... in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the biographers’ Marlowe is always liable to be defined by his death, if only because a sizeable proportion of the detailed evidence we have about him ...”

“... in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the right. The Republicans in Congress put up a wall of opposition and indulged the populist right in openly questioning his legitimacy as president. The defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012 caused a further, decisive slide to the right, opening the door for Trump. In 2016 no major corporation was ...”

“... such as David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes, though it certainly happens in life. Patrick Gale’s recent television drama Man in an Orange Shirt, part of a season marking the anniversary of decriminalisation, was based on his family history, right down to the novelettish-seeming details of his mother discovering her husband’s love letters ...”

“... a golden spiderweb being drawn from their mouths … The golden thread of plaited silk hung on the wall by the window in that same room where Ivan Ilyich and the old Prince died.’ She began to write an ‘exploration’, which Sargeson helped her sell. (It came out in 1957 as Owls Do Cry, marketed as a ‘novel’; in it, among other things, a boy, Toby ...”

“... Can we imagine either sentiment being expressed at Heathrow airport? The poet and novelist Patrick McGuinness, in his forthcoming book Other People’s Countries (itself a rich analysis of home and homelessness; McGuinness is half-Irish and half-Belgian) quotes Simenon, who was asked why he didn’t change his nationality, ‘the way successful ...”

“... country is theirs, but that they have to win it by daring exploits. For them, as for the various Wall Street ‘insiders’, what matters isn’t knowledge but ‘information’, and information is invariably tied to brokers or commission agents whose loyalties can be bought or sold. Manuchar Ghorbanifar, the Iranian go-between and Khashoggi colleague ...”

“... colleagues in 1716, they were in the middle of this exhilarating scientific challenge. On the wall of the very room where they met that autumn was framed a grand, engraved illustration, recently composed by Whiston and John Senex, the London maker of maps and globes, showing all 21 known comets, with detailed notes about the attempt to establish their ...”

“... dears, how I’m lonely,’ the cardinal confides to the old portraits by Zurbarán hanging on the wall. ‘The evenings are suicide.’Collecting​ some of my thoughts about Firbank, I’ve wondered about his presence in my adult life, through the 35 years that Bertram Park’s photo of him has hung in a tutelary way above my desk. He hasn’t, for what ...”

“... time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of ...”

“... bound with long, loose chains, curled up tightly on beds of straw in scoops taken out of a wall of snow. Nearby was his son’s snowmobile (he mushed for the first time when he was five), a cargo sledge, a general purpose sledge and the stripped-down racing sledge, weighing only eleven kilos. In the Avannaata Qimussersua, the dozen dogs have to haul ...”

“... the sight of “poor wretches” who had built “wigwams of fir branches” against his demesne wall.’Yet in 1847, as the famine in Ireland became increasingly serious, Sir William Gregory drafted what is often described as ‘the infamous Gregory clause’ in the Poor Law legislation for Ireland going through the House of Commons: any family holding more ...”