“... end of Chapter XXXIV) Deer Mister Fitzpiers A’m writen to thee now to tell thee what may lie heavy on thy belly! Yon hiair that Barber Percomb took that wer my hiair, by t’Holy Book, a zold it to’m – an’ all to deck proud Mistress Charmond’s hiead an’ neck! Zo what thou stroak’st in’t hers but mine, zo pirty, vrom a maid divine it ...”

“... gallery Christina Rossetti Lady Lassetter sits at her mirror; presented as a woodland frieze in May, her drapery is appliquéd with specimens of British botany. On the dresser’s marbled top a signed invitation can explain this flowered and zoomorphic frock, designed to be a favourite verse sartorialised. So, astride her décolletage squirrels skip and ...”

“... in the dark beneath the skull. My son is learning insects ladybird and beetle Painted Lady may or dragonfly and watching I think of how the mind evolves one meeting at a time spider and fly the lizard stage where everything is tuned to warmth the moonlit phase a month of songbirds in this house amid the fields we’ve rented for a summer how the sounds ...”

“... nude Or the woman standing at her basin. Short of work and short of ideas, Omissible. Though I may have been Projecting, as my sister implied. When what one sets out to do gets replaced, Devolved amongst cicadas, stray peeps Of hummingbirds. Sand, dust and my bootprints – At night a porous rain that regrooms The country lane. The horse-owners Nodding ...”

“... his nose. Quack, his partner, is dressed similarly. Quack: ‘There’s talk in Washington that we may be going to war.’ Quips: ‘I know how to stop it.’ Quack: ‘How?’ Quips: ‘For starters . . .’ He makes a peremptory fart on his horn. Quack waits: ‘That’s it?’ Quips: ‘No. After that we blitz the enemy with popcorn.’ Quack: ‘Who’s ...”

“... Beyond the plywood walls, out in the open, grief woven in our hearts. Martha Mavroidi sing, we may get ...”

“... for each other. These thoughts and others came to me While I slept in my bed, And, for all I know, may have been whispered Into my ear by the black cat Who keeps a nightly vigil by my side, So mice don’t nibble my toes Or take shortcuts over my pillow. Things Need Me City of poorly loved chairs, bedroom slippers, frying pans, I’m rushing back to you ...”

“... two plump rooks at roost each a singular stern mass of black gloss in their pomp – (early that May morning, in the college she had founded, I stood on the lawn promising I would tell him. As quietly, to herself almost, she said she wasn’t sure it was his, she’d lost it, whatever it was or might have been I remember how the sound of the choir from the ...”

“... Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile ...”

“... the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim visited Schumann in the asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, in May 1855, he discovered that the composer – by this time in the tertiary stage of syphilis – had been spending his time compiling an alphabetical list of cities. Nearly a year later, Brahms found Schumann doing almost the same thing: ‘I looked again at his ...”

“... An item in the 11 May 1889 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette, quoted by Ruskin in a footnote to Praeterita, reports ‘extraordinary’ events in some allotments in Leicester. Every evening for several days a nightingale has been singing in a thorn bush above the mouth of a railway tunnel on the Midland mainline, attracting so large a crowd of listeners (some of whom have stayed regularly until the early hours of the morning) that the Chief Constable has seen fit to draft in a number of policemen ‘to maintain order and prevent damage ...”

“... without emotion. This feeling, while it shall endure, and pervade the bulk of our population, may be held as a proof that loyalty, and the love of justice, and hatred of oppression, are among our permanent national characteristics. So wrote one of Sir Walter Scott’s anonymous competitors in the preface to The Court of Holyrood: Fragments of an Old ...”

“... Iran, he is inclined to overlook such nuggets of truth as lie buried within them. For example, it may be sloppy and misleading to describe Iranians as having a ‘martyr complex’, but one cannot deny that martyrdom has a central role in the religious and popular culture of the Iranian people, and that this has had some impact on their political ...”

“... have no Geist. And what, pray, is Geist? It is, of course, many things. In the present context, it may be defined as speculative intellect in excess of material facts. In its awareness of this chronic excess (for it is self-conscious through and through), Geist turns either aggressive and destructive, or habitually melancholy, in its attitude to the world of ...”

“... conclusions which so filled him with fright that he preferred to lock them away in his heart. He may (or he may not) have surmised that in the last analysis he aimed at something beyond the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas ...”