“... entomology, ornithology, or geology’. Palmer had first met Blake through a common acquaintance, John Linnell, an accomplished and successful artist and probably the most important single influence on the shape of his life. Linnell is the comic monster of the story, a ‘splendid, courageous and manly tyrant’ in Herbert’s view, who would certainly have ...”

“... and old-fashioned time indicators such as ‘presently’ (lifted, according to his friend John Spurling, from Richard Hughes). And he renders his characters’ inner voices oddly, sometimes putting thoughts in quotation marks, sometimes using free indirect style and sometimes forgetting which of the two he’s doing. From time to time this makes ...”

“... I looked fat, dull and unmanly. The achievements of others, particularly those of my older brother John, stood in for anything that I might achieve myself, and afterwards a series of distinguished men were to step into John’s shoes. I acquired a spectacular ability to not see, identify or shrewdly evaluate people or ...”

“... Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be called ‘automatic writings’, it ...”

“... confronted soldiers as they marched in thin lines across open fields or in dense, often burning woods. Three and a half million men were under arms: virtually the entire military-age population of the South and a good proportion of the North as well. Very large armies – sometimes 100,000 to a side – fought scores of deadly pitched battles and hundreds ...”

“... that had prevailed before the war, resting on the gold standard; then the order forged at Bretton Woods, which succeeded it after the war; and finally spelling out the demise of this successor in the 1970s.2 What had replaced the world instituted at Bretton Woods was a set of system-wide constraints affecting all ...”

“... replies: you should read some memoirs. A pity, because his history begins in the days when Sammy Woods could reside as a member of his college for 12 terms, playing rugger and cricket for Cambridge, while failing monotonously to pass the university entrance exam. Edwardian etiquette decreed that if you called on a fellow undergraduate and he was out, you ...”

“... for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves. OK? So they don’t get an idea for a while. They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ...”

“... given order is frozen into a system for decades on end, as at Vienna, Versailles, Yalta or Bretton Woods, but there comes a time when the logic of the system fails to hold. This is pretty much where we are now. In the early Eighties I used to give talks to the middle managers of a major oil company about the changing international environment. It was my custom ...”

“... how the act of lament could itself galvanise the old into something living:Very old are the woods;      And the buds that breakOut of the brier’s boughs,      When March winds wake,So old with their beauty are –      Oh, no man knowsThrough what wild centuries      Roves back the rose.De la Mare tried out ‘roams’, ‘roots’ and ...”

“... the purposes of the conversation; here, it is the ‘grand, otherworldly’ appearance, out of the woods, of a female moose on the moonlit macadam. Here we could say Bishop found the courage to say what she felt deserved commemoration in culture, joining herself implicitly to the line of Thoreau, Audubon and Moore. But where most other observers of nature have ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... was born. The disillusionment was not slow in coming. One wave began on 28 May 1754, in the woods of the Ohio Valley, when British colonial militia killed a French-Canadian army officer, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, who had supposedly been travelling under a flag of truce. A short time later, a large French force led by Jumonville’s brother defeated ...”

“... you can’t bring yourself to love it. It’s a position that has its advocates. A few years ago, John Mueller’s Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida urged a relaxed attitude: far more has been spent on nuclear weapons than can be justified by any sensible political strategy; they aren’t of much military use; their proliferation ...”