“... Grizedale Forest Park, in a leafy dale between Windemere and Coniston, teems with amazing works in wood and stone. When I first walked about in it twenty years ago, there was no leaflet listing numbered pieces, and as we walked along foresters’ tracks, there, unexpectedly, was a channelled tree held horizontal on stilts, with water running down it. Was it a ...”

“... human fertility: men must be circumcised, and the wives of the early patriarchs (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel) are barren until the Lord chooses to permit them to breed. He will threaten his people again with complete destruction when they follow Aaron’s encouragement to worship the golden calf. Promiscuous fertility and polytheism seem to be connected ...”

“... and Napoleonic high collars, he exposed the collar bones in a chalice of roses, he carved tall elm wood prostheses like medieval caskets for the paralympic champion Aimee Mullins and, most famously, scooped the back of a dress or a pair of trousers to disclose the soft involution of the buttocks and what he saw as nature’s own line of beauty, the curve of ...”

“... at the Palm Tree, on the Regent’s Canal near Roman Road, not far from the unrecorded site of Rachel Whiteread’s removed sculpture, House. The artist known as Schtinter started with a 96-hour edit of all the early scenes in the Queen Vic. It probably felt much longer to anyone watching. But some were hypnotised by the diet of fraternal conflict and ...”

“... to the teeth, only to be thwarted by an announcement: This is the police. You are in a protected wood. There is a Berks, Bucks and Oxon Naturalists’ Trust birdsong project being conducted here. You have been recorded. Unload your weapons. Jacobean English is a delight to Croucher: he likes to quote Shakespeare and compare himself with Puck. He more ...”

“... Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to know.’ Elsewhere in the film, when the three of them are fencing together, playing at fighting, Travis gets cut on the hand, and is fascinated by his own blood. ‘Look,’ he ...”

“... psychic concert with another man, dead or alive. Maxim kills Rebecca, Philip kills his cousin Rachel by an act of omission, and Julius, true to his overwrought foreign nature, wastes four women in all. These examples are taken from the novels, but the short stories, some very warped indeed, are full of them. Such murders are never planned, and never quite ...”

“... As Julius demonstrates, he denied the redemptive nature of art in his 1928 Preface to The Sacred Wood, where he asserts that poetry is a ‘superior amusement’. Later in the same paragraph, he says: ‘And certainly poetry is not the inculcation of morals, or the direction of politics; and no more is it religion or an equivalent of religion, except by some ...”

“... in the sea and hills, the silence and the wildlife. Our cottage had been recently done up with a wood-burning stove and comfortable furniture; a deep window ledge held a small number of books: The Highland Clearances by John Prebble, pamphlets on local flora, a field guide to birds, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. After we’d unpacked, we went for a ...”

“... with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every purchase, names are made and names are called. But Saatchi’s taste, his collecting policy, is eclectic and elusive. So much art, of so many kinds, has passed into and sometimes ...”

“... zone of large mid-Victorian properties divided into flats. I noticed a Methodist church with a wood-faced turret and a selection of hostels for backpacking passerines. But despite such awkward neighbours, and a degree of spillage from Finsbury Park kerb-crawlers, and the all too evident desperation of bruised addict-prostitutes, Wilberforce Road throbs ...”

“... used for the filming.I first saw the house in 1968. Jonathan Miller lives in the same street and Rachel, his wife, saw the ‘For Sale’ sign go up. It belonged to an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room and also in its small garden. Slightly older than the other houses in the crescent, like many of them it had been ...”

“... or interested in sailing. It’s an exercise in the modelling of negative space as revealing as a Rachel Whiteread sculpture. Lish can produce a sketch of a neighbourhood that is suffused with a character’s point of view, in this case the young and rather overexcited Gloria walking near Commonwealth Avenue: ‘It was a twenty-degree winter’s ...”

“... ward grew dark; but he was still complainingAnd calling out for ‘Dickie’. ‘Curse the wood!It’s time to go, O Christ, and what’s the good?We’ll never take it, and it’s always raining.’His protest against the war was egged on by the new pacifist friends he had made on his excursions to Garsington – notably Bertrand Russell and the ...”

“... legs. A dressing table for my mother had bulky, rounded drawers, made of some kind of heavy yellow wood the colour of camel hide; she draped it in pink spotted tulle over a heavier satin underskirt, with braiding and a frill to define the kidney-shaped contour of the tabletop. It was a piece made by hand to look machine-tooled and modern; each of the drawers ...”