“... Early in​ The Enchanted Wood (1939), the first of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books, the three main characters – Jo, Bessie and Fanny – make friends with a ‘small elf’ called Silky, who lives on one of the lower branches of the Faraway Tree. In the recent film adaptation, The Magic Faraway Tree, Silky is a big fairy who feels insecure about her size ...”

“... images add up: those stumps are accoutrements of a particular culture, but the larger pieces of wood, the ‘rigid trees’, are immovable – and less readable. As the boy vanishes through them – either donning or discarding the blazer – we wonder a bit about the perceiver. What does the watcher of this figure know, or wish to know?Poems like this ...”

“... different treatments, the majority of which were tried on Alice, but most shared the view of Charles Taylor, Alice’s first doctor in New York, that the body should be stimulated and the mind soothed. From this it was only a short step to saying, as several neurologists did, that too much education was a bad thing for a woman. ‘For patience, for ...”

“... their author occupied no chair. The slim gathering of such pieces that he published as The Sacred Wood in 1920, and the still slimmer pamphlet, Homage to John Dryden, that the Hogarth Press issued in 1924, acquired near cult status among the advanced young. His reputation stood highest at Cambridge, where he already seemed to figure as one of the informing ...”

“... her up as Charlie McCarthy’s kid sister. In her impressively restrained autobiography, Knock Wood, Candice Bergen remembered Charlie’s room in the family house in Beverly Hills, with its neat bed, a wardrobe stocked with monogrammed clothes, a desk to study at, a West Point cadet’s hat, a feathered Indian headdress and a sweet little pin-up of ...”

“... was too small for its burgeoning contents. Leopold had already foreseen this and commissioned Charles Girault, the architect of the Petit Palais in Paris, to design a larger building, which opened in 1910, a year after Leopold’s death. The museum, which remained a monument to his imperial genius, was also a hub of ‘scientific’ endeavour and a ...”

“... in January 1948 garnered little attention, and nothing sold from a de Kooning exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in April. ‘Isolation,’ Greenberg wrote that year, was ‘the natural condition of high art in America’, and soon the Existentialist talk of alienation was matched by the political reality, as the House Un-American Activities Committee ...”

“... from copies of the book and mounted to catch the eye of serial sentimentalists in antique markets. Charles I, a cloaked and lace-collared dandy, strolls across the park to his execution. Queen Matilda, hooded like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, escapes across a winter landscape. The princes in the Tower are a suspect download soliciting close ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... week at least, Wilde was as much an ordinary man as a flamboyant artist who willed his own demise. Charles Ricketts, who designed books for him, wrote that ‘most writers on Wilde see in him the aesthete, the predestined victim of a theory, and the martyr to a subversive cult.’ This was wrong: ‘His childish hints at strange sins in Dorian Gray and other ...”

“... of English Poets”!’ he wrote to Emily Hale in February 1933, halfway through his year as Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet ...”

“... Portnoy’s Complaint I’m not surprised at Dad’s reaction when he found it in my bookcase at Wood Lane fifty years ago. In some misguided missionary zeal that makes me cringe even to remember I may actually have recommended it. Because if it shocked him then it shocks me now, though I don’t imagine he read more than a few pages before putting it back ...”

“... batter running down the side of a mixing bowl, and that day her skin, like the furniture and the wood floors, glistened in the humidity. Her eyes had a faintly Asian slant that made her look almost seductive. Her face was narrower, longer, than it had seemed in pictures, and her nose in profile was colossal and angled in the middle. She had a broad and ...”

“... theologians who are meanwhile busy inventing Christian metaphysics: ‘There’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against.’ And, once discovered, the mere existence of the crucifix in all its solidity somehow comes to be an adequate proof for the whole Christian system. ‘It states a fact,’ Waugh says on the last ...”

“... books I swotted up for my scholarship. Remembering Bruce MacFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammerbeam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the Army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of any other universities or places of higher ...”