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“... a large wooden object in the shape of a spindle. Our young guide explained this was made of olive wood which, if the pilgrim could only grasp it, would assure her of a place in heaven. If she could not, she was consigned to hell. I didn’t want to see the outcome of this epic struggle: the woman’s wrist and the span of her palm looked so unequal to the ...”

“... until the miraculous happens’. Here’s a crowd of metaphors – walking, talking, working wood, working miracles – and in the middle of it a technical term (‘cadence’) immediately caught up into a poetic reflection of the subject (‘a cadence or a tenderness’). The whole thing should sound a bit woozy but is somehow exact. It is a risky ...”

“... of the term ‘Elves’, as also for his shabby dealing with the splendid notion of Great Birnam wood advancing upon high Dunsinane hill. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature admits with some complacency to ‘not being specially well read in modern English’ and to ‘no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English ...”

“... predictable. In the first paragraph of the General Introduction Deane compares this anthology with Charles Read’s Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879): it would be interesting to learn why Field Day rejected writers such as Monk, Ryves, Tighe, Leadbetter, Hall, Mulholland, and over a dozen other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the ...”

“... transporters; there were more than enough floral tributes to replant Nevada. Four pall-bearers – Charles Kray (North), Freddie Foreman (South), Johnny Nash (West), Teddy Dennis (East) – would symbolise the seigneurial homage paid by the four cardinal districts of London. The conceit was Blakean, the Sons of Albion ‘dividing the space of love with brazen ...”

“... others he might never have met. (Tim Burton’s biopic of the ‘world’s worst film-maker’, Ed Wood, contrived to have the two misunderstood auteurs meet in a tawdry Tinseltown lounge.) In addition to all this, there is an apparently unending succession of books, of which Simon Callow’s ongoing biography is the most monumental, now two volumes in and not ...”

“... carriage. But the long sea voyage, followed by intense humidity, had inevitably resulted in warped wood, faded and rotting fabric, tarnished gilding and broken joints. Roe learned that Jahangir had later asked Jesuits at his court for their opinion of the gifts, questioning ‘whether the king of England were a great king, that sent presents of so small ...”

“... foundation for what is going to be a very long struggle’. The struggle has been long already. Charles Glass Jerusalem Because I live ten blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, my response to the events of 11 September is intensely localised; but because I was a thousand miles away in a foreign country when the events occurred, my experience of ...”

“... accoutrements that always come with a vacuum cleaner I spot some quite ancient-looking decorated wood. Alas, one of the rules of the establishment (displayed on a painted board) is that one cannot go through the contents of the skip, so I have to leave my fancied medieval panels to their fate.Afterwards we go the back way along the Feizor road, stopping to ...”

“... now a part of Arles but then a separate fortified village. When he refers to the ‘forks of elm wood’ used for the hanging, it is not immediately clear what he means. Later you understand: two forked poles or tree limbs would be fixed in the ground, and a transverse pole of wood laid between them, and from this the ...”

“... There are some – and not just reluctant New Georgians – who dissent from all this. Prince Charles, who recently toured the area with Business in the Community, has come out against the new aesthetic. But the age of the bleeding heart is over, and this Royal whinge about the conditions in which many Bengalis live and work was too much for one resident ...”

“... the poetry of Frost. I’m thinking especially of the poems having to do with work, apple-picking, wood-cutting and the like, poems where he discovers, as in ‘Mowing’, that ‘the fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.’ ‘Truth,’ James writes, emerges from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create ...”

“... no more than blocks of expanded polystyrene. Patriarchal authority, as it turned out, was balsa wood under the mahogany veneer. That first night Dad was stricken but not rejecting. When we finally went to bed he said everything would be all right. There was no hug but then he wasn’t huggy. There was no sense of a hug withheld. His wish of ‘Happy New ...”

“... dismay, after going over my life, that I have no philosophy.’ Some respite came when H. Harvey Wood, the Scottish representative of the British Council, persuaded it to employ Edwin to organise lecture programmes for overseas troops – principally Polish, Czech and French – in Edinburgh. The Muirs moved to the city in 1942 and played host to many ...”