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“... when he was diverted from his normal course by succumbing to an outside fashion: for it was in the summers of 1765 and ’66 that it took place, just when the new Linnaean tide had begun to break upon our shores. If that tide could temporarily divert even a man like White, its current must indeed have been powerful. Another who was caught up by it, some ten ...”

“... sight and out of time; the eruption of faraway Mount Tambora in 1815, for example, produced cold summers and critically low harvests in Europe (giving us also Byron’s ‘Darkness’ and, when the sun came out again, Keats’s ‘To Autumn’). Weather, like war and disease, was no respecter of national borders; distant war might come close to home. War and ...”

“... in a documentary by Werner Herzog, the queasily engrossing Grizzly Man (2005). Treadwell spent 13 summers camping among the grizzlies in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve. During the last five of these, he recorded more than one hundred hours of video footage, which provide the raw material for Herzog’s film. Treadwell loved ‘his’ bears with ...”

“... the grim pasts and only slightly less grim presents; the unending monochrome winter and the brief summers that are all leaves and insects and blue and green sparkle. His poems, one reads, have been translated into fifty, then sixty, and at the last seventy, languages (which is extraordinary for anyone writing in a ‘small’ language, much less a poet). In ...”

“... this is a book about how a writer and a novelist might survive those achingly hot and silent summers. The title of Where I Was From refers not just to Sacramento and a far from benevolent family situation, but to wagon-train morality, the trust in meaning, in decency between the living and the dead, and a faith in the American project that turns not just ...”

“... and whimsical at the same time.’ Patrick is the damaged, scornful victim of his father, David Melrose, ‘descended from Charles II through a prostitute’. Centuries of damp arrest have created the monstrous David: ‘The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing-room ...”

“... in a family follows the departure of a particularly tiresome and exacting house guest. Elizabeth David herself – a veteran by marriage of wartime Cairo and pre-Independence Delhi – advised her readers thirty years ago: ‘Devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”

“... time a matador had died in a professional Spanish bullfight since 1985. I’d spent a number of summers going to corridas when I was researching a book on the cultural politics of Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s, and became convinced that bullfighting was an underexplored chapter in this history. Barrio, I hazily recalled, had been a ...”

“... that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In either case, historiography is given the task that Wordsworth assigned to poetry: to reconcile the seemingly unrelated worlds ...”

“... the novel power of social media to drum up interest and financial support. His campaign manager David Plouffe liked to say of Obama’s candidacy: ‘Walking a tightrope without a net … That’s when we are at our best.’ Yet when Obama does make a misstep – and inevitably there are plenty, from dismissing Clinton as ‘likeable enough’, to ...”

“... produces alkaloids very similar to LSD; its growth is critically dependent on wet springs and summers; among its ill-effects is a very pronounced decline in fertility. From these facts Matossian deduces a number of possibilities: it may have been mycotoxin infection rather than straight Malthusian pressure which kept the European population stable for so ...”

“... and unfit houses’ in Manchester, 15,000 in Oldham, 5000 in Rochdale and 80,000 in Liverpool. David Kynaston cites these figures in his new book, On the Cusp: Days of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition ...”

“... and Scotland the more deeply felt his writing becomes. His examination of Northern poets such as David Morley, Simon Armitage and Sean O’Brien is marvellously sensitive to their regionalism and to the bitter undertow of history and class politics in some of their work. I have a grouse about both these books: neither has an index. Also, when reading ...”

“... had played, and liked to write about cricket, and welcomed its ‘benign colonisation of English summers’. Yet his writing is all of a piece: his thoughts, his sentences, the words that he chooses follow a route of their own. One thing the TLS and the LRB have in common is the trace left by his headings: ‘Feuds Corner’ for a review of a novel about ...”