“... with binoculars and cameras, standing in silence, is a bit like watching a church service. As Mary Oliver wrote, ‘do you bow your head when you pray or do you look/up into that blue space?’ The intensity of locating something so small and quick requires both force and passivity. Many birders spend long days in nature looking for an example of a particular ...”

“... Richard Jefferies put it, ‘no one can live on iron, or coal, or cotton – the object is really sacks of wheat.’ The most immediate environmental impact of the railway and the steamship was to extend the acreage of land dedicated to staple crops. Vast stretches of Ukraine, North America, Argentina and Australia were turned over to wheat; rice paddies ...”

“... impulsive tics and Korsakoff’s (Sergei, that is) amnesia, both recently made famous again by Oliver Sacks; Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, just to bring us right up to the mad cow. (No woman – at least at this level – seems to have had anything named after her.) A name announces only the dénouement, however: it does not convey the extraordinary ...”

“... like us.’ My personal mythology has me reading this letter at the age of nine, when they sent me Oliver Twist and Great Expectations as a birthday present. But it must, in fact, have been written when I stood as Labour candidate in the mock-election at my girls’ grammar school, in 1964. Far from being embarrassed by my mother’s politics, I was rather ...”

“... sitting down occasionally by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to ...”

“... brutally, casually cruel: his men are all ‘gimps’ and ‘geeks’, substance-addicted sad-sacks, perverts and crooks, anorak-cases with ‘cheese-culture skin’ and scalps ‘ornamented with scabs’. And his women – of which there are, unsurprisingly, mainly three – are ludicrously gorgeous, pouting projections of male fantasy, with vaguely ...”