“... Days like Today Sometimes, on Sundays, they walk a little ways into the oval spell others are soft on. She, a maid, unknown to terror, rising out of the ridge, its spreading cedars bemused and endearing. The ancestors have never been influenced by any kind of logic, not even a shrike’s, and now I can’t even say what a hornet’s-eye view of this catastrophe might englobe, if we were all brothers and near to one another ...”

“... The Welkin We’re patching up an agreement today. The insides won’t let us. I sent you copies by return mail any time soon. We came to a long Q and A period, to which dreams are the smutty alternative. Of these by far the most startling (not to be tedious) combat greasiness from Calexico to Texarkana, a splash on everything they do. They can’t fit it in ...”

“... A single drop fills the rainbow glass. The fountain overflows. How come the purr and passing of this every night arrives at stealth? Just – be prepared. If it happens every day around this time it happens more than twice. I’d wager this one has nothing in it. So’s your old man. We get called out often on all kinds of suspicious business, he decried ...”

“... Deep in the Valley rich soil drives the mechanism. Grain spills from the husks. Despite the season of recovery, the family is forced to sell up – a lost century becomes a dynasty and the rich soil becomes polluted. They’ve cleared and shaped the place, a portrait of themselves. On a summer evening they’ll look out over the paddocks, over burnt stubble, over stands of mallee, through a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos, into the rich red sunset ...”

“... Hydrodamalis Gigas after G.W. Steller These beasts are four fathoms long, but perfectly gentle. They roam the shallower waters like sea-cattle and graze on the waving flags of kelp. At the slightest wound their innards will flop out with a great hissing sound, but they haven’t yet grown to fear mankind: no matter how many of their number might be killed, they never try to swim away – they are so mild ...”

“... eyed askance or turned askew. Like Dedalus in the Irish National Library, trying to impress A.E., John Eglinton and Mr Best with his theory of Hamlet, the narrator of Nothing Like the Sun throws in lots of local colour, freely kitsched with quasi-Elizabethan compounds and archaic turns of phrase. Moreover, following Dedalus’s example in Ulysses, Burgess ...”

“... Powell is 92 this year. He has written 19 novels, four volumes of memoirs, one sort of biography (John Aubrey and His Friends), three plays, two books of collected literary criticism, and now, with the arrival of Journals 1990-92, three volumes of diaries. The D&O is there from the first words of his first novel, Afternoon Men, published 65 years ...”

“... a used Johnnie,’ she added – this being the name by which former members of St John’s College, Oxford, refer to themselves. We knew that because both of us were also, to use the posh term, Johnians. The LRB asked Blair to write a piece, and he did. Its left-is-best vibe makes entertaining reading now, but it’s well written and at least ...”

“... at the time of the 2015 election. This is the outcome which has been argued for by the Tory MP John Stevenson, who is Scottish, but represents a constituency in the north of England. ‘You can’t have a situation where the government of the United Kingdom is determined by the representation from Scotland, which could then have significant influence in ...”

“... for Lucas There is too much light in the world to bear the weight of Euclid, too much fog, with shore birds, bright in the salt-water channels thinning the sands, the Black-Tailed Godwit, the Curlew Sandpiper, named from the field guide, but still uncertain, still defiantly heraldic. I’ve lived through days like these before and scarcely noticed, skylarks hidden in my sleeves, whole afternoons of stork and oriole ...”

“... To her the kissing group of husbands and wives was like a gang of schoolgirls in the laundry, all fuss and bother, no proper theory of how sexuality is conditioned by the economic strictures of society and not by the games shows and the sporting programmes or by the lies that stain the pages of cheap paper, for example, when her friends told her she was a rotten writer plumping up the pillow of her conventional emotions so she could feel in love temporarily click on click off and revel in a moody air in the kitchen, scribbling diary entries as though they were great roiling thoughts or worse, riveting literature meant to be read out during the long night of the adult education course training tapping dogs to do the new job, it’s obviously made for love, this mechanical device with its ribbon spooling out reams of confectionery and duplicity that young women desperately want to believe could happen to them, like doctors who are stern and rich – no, will happen to them – and the pretty nurses who are young and whimpering, but somehow dazzling, the same story, only glowing with a more literary quality – what the fuck – now it happens, only the ending is wrong, and the hero, called Kevin or Duane, is a loser – there are no doctors here, they live elsewhere with their wives, their investments, and their matched pairs of children ...”

“... Idea of Steve Too bad I have this idea of him based on someone else, named Matt (another uncluttered name), whom I disliked for no reason other than having once thought he misprised me, which I didn’t really believe. (Whew!) This is getting complicated, like always. Let’s leave Steve at the wellhead of a dream, where he belongs, and belongs also to others who will make fun of him and gradually come to despise themselves for doing so ...”

“... For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.                                                                       Psalm 103 Alone at home, I’m working in the yard, sun-warmed, a breeze off the coast, the farmer from over the road laying waste to his fields, loam gone to dust in the heat; I can see it gusting away ...”

“...                               Still they stood, A great wave from it going over them, As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour Had made them certain earth returned their love. Robert Frost If anything is safe to love, it is the jellyfish, Aurelia aurita, that pink and silver moon-cloud, drifting wild in every harbour from the South Atlantic to the Bay of Reykjavik; or Hippocampus, monstrous to the Greeks, though shaped like horses, gentle as the wind in August, moving softly through the weeds, the brood male gathering the eggs into his pouch like treasure, while the female swims away to miles of seagrass; coral; predators ...”

“... She said, affably, ‘Calm next Mahnday,’ Indicating that his pants would be ready by then, But nonetheless unwittingly invoking a mysterious occasion, Which, on ultimate reflection, appeared to be a sort Of centennial celebration for the author of Joseph and His Brothers And other works, even as it eventually turned out not to be. ‘Let’s have lunch on Tuesday,’ suggested Dubble-Barrell (he Pronounced it ‘Jewsday’, as if there had been inserted into the medieval calendar Another liturgical day, devoted to violent expressions of rage Against an unfortunate race, ungracious In its refusals of redemption, tiresome in its endless Ability to elicit persecution from the peoples of the West and elsewhere ...”