“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... fear: the scrabbling of the black bear’s claws at the screen door, the creaking silence of the woods, the cold. In Europe it is the hand of human labour, the millennial arts of settlement and civilisation, which awaken awe. In Canada, the hands have done so little. Instead, there is the silent immensity of the cold. I remember one Christmas several years ...”

“... Princess Diana? It’s pretty much a case of choose your own conspiracy theory, unless you’re Michael Burgess, Coroner of the Queen’s Household, whose tedious task it now is to ascertain the manner of Diana’s death. Entirely by coincidence, Burgess will also preside over the inquest into the death of Dodi Fayed, because Fayed is buried on the family ...”

“... deportations begin: Kapuściński’s father, an officer in the defeated Polish Army, takes to the woods, disguised as a peasant. His mother spends the nights standing at the window, waiting for the NKVD to come. Then the hunger starts. To quell the pangs, a Red Army soldier teaches him how to roll and smoke his first cigarette. Such experiences immunised him ...”

“... as the Bec Auer. The background is a flat and deeply unconvincing postcard-style landscape of woods and mountains, tinted purple for romantic effect. In the far right, twinkling like a pair of shoes in The Wizard of Oz, is a tiny waterfall, an alternating glow simulating, without any real plausibility, the splash of the cascade. The installation is called ...”

“... axe to bear on a range of other topics as well. Myth after myth comes toppling down in his pages. Woods, he points out, do not become ‘exhausted’: rather, they are indefinitely self-renewing – ‘no more destroyed by being cut down than a meadow is destroyed by cutting a crop of hay.’ To be destroyed, a wood has to be removed wholesale – or else ...”

“... lawyers, bankers and software engineers. They bought McMansions in its acres of recently felled woods, commuted the 25 miles east to Boston or various distances north and south to the biotech firms along the ring roads and generally changed Hopkinton’s flavour from what you might call ‘Masshole townie’ to ‘East Coast Yuppie’. (Twelve years ...”

“... Queen’s House, the ‘castle’ that Vanbrugh built for himself, the Georgian crescent of Michael Searles’s Paragon – and while Dulwich is less monumental, it does have John Soane’s Picture Gallery and the buildings of Dulwich College, ranging from mannered Georgian to Barry’s lurid neo-Gothic, with the remnants of the Crystal Palace nearby ...”

“... In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel ...”

“... In MacQueen’s opinion, Sierra Leone’s free African people had ‘retrograde[d] in the woods into a state of nature and barbarism, or become vagrants about Freetown’. The colony was ‘a heterogenous mass of ignorance, barbarism, indolence, injustice and oppression’. MacQueen had never visited Sierra Leone, or any part of Africa.Everill ...”

“... which so far runs to four volumes by F.H. Hinsley and three collaborators, and now this volume by Michael Howard, the astonishing record is clear and long but also – strangely for a subject of such encrusted deviousness – entirely believable. With admirable skills of exposition and a truly awesome mastery of deception’s dodgy ambience and ...”

“... of the Jacobean Cardenio survives independently of Theobald’s adaptation. This is a song, ‘Woods, Rocks & Mountains’, found in a manuscript collection of settings by the Jacobean lutenist Robert Johnson (who is not to be confused with the Tudor church musician of that name, or indeed with the great Delta blues singer of the 1930s). Johnson is known ...”

“... His determination to see nature as benign has been called a flaw by his most intelligent critic, Michael Cohen, in The Pathless Way. As we climbed together on a route called Great White Book in the Tuolumne domes east of Yosemite, he told me how Muir was disconcerted by the writhen and stunted junipers rooting in crevices of the granite because they were ...”

“... egged on by the clenched fists of peasants and shadowed by the police. After hiding in the woods they had to walk over the Pyrenees, dodging the searchlights and bullets of French border guards. The high, simple principle which took them out to Spain seems to have sustained these men – and one woman – through pain, terror, and the confusion and ...”

“... Coming through the woods, down a soft winding track, two minutes shy of the time we have been instructed to arrive, 10 a.m. on a bright Sunday morning, we see the man already there in the clearing, his right hand on the dog’s collar. Two minutes later, you feel, and he’d be gone. But this is the right person, undoubtedly, the one we have come to see ...”