“... I paint a big picture, then afterwards I usually want to engrave something small and meticulous on wood, and I can sit over it for a whole day ... Assiduousness, laboriousness is something innate in us Germans: it is our element, we feel at ease in it. In Tieck’s Dürer the contrariety of hand and mind, North and South, craft and art, is complicated into ...”

“... been or thought to go) that reminded me of Mandelstam’s Moscow, a ‘tossed salad of glass and wood and milk’: The next morning, when the city stirred to life, they both lay awake in their own beds. The homing pigeons flew across the sky, the small brass whistles bound to their tails humming in a harmonious low tone. Not far away, Tao music played on a ...”

“... he’s getting down might be nonsense. During her time at the National Beryl appeared opposite Michael Gough in the world premiere of Edward Albee’s Counting the Ways. It was a strange choice to open the vast new complex with – a small play. In the course of it, the performers are required to throw off impersonation and improvise briefly as ...”

“... British intelligence. ‘Danny Boy’ is the call-sign of Smith’s superior in London, played by Michael Hordern. One of the most puzzling things about the movie is why the man allocating the code names would choose to call himself ‘Danny Boy’ (I’m reminded of Steve Buscemi’s character in Reservoir Dogs, complaining about his nom de heist being ‘Mr ...”

“... and vote on our delegates’ report regarding the closure of Cortonwood and also of Bullcliffe Wood – both within the Barnsley Area. They also heard reports on other pit closures: Herrington in Co. Durham, Polmaise in Scotland and Snowdon, Kent. The voting was unanimous: strike from Monday 12 March. So my colliery was on strike; my village was about to ...”

“... satisfied of the defendant’s guilt, the court held that the pig be ‘strangled on a gibbet of wood’ so that ‘an example may be made and justice maintained’. Pigs were not the only culprits. The medieval courts of Europe, particularly those of France, appear to have dealt with a ‘miscellaneous crew’ of beasts, including ...”

“... turned this trope on its head in the early 1630s: for him Shakespeare was still a bird – a wood-warbler, apparently – but one who was to be identified not as a divine father but as a divinely parented infant. In ‘L’Allegro’, the lively extrovert of the title proposes an excursion to the theatre, where he and his companions may hear ‘Sweetest ...”

“... Deep lustrous colours – oils, unmixed, swirly and thick – within a wide and solid matt-black wood frame. (Nolde made them himself: he had no use for the ornate plaster gilt of a backward-looking early 20th century.) Or waving, blowsy flowers, an infinity of oranges and reds. Or an agitated sea with an oblique crack of sunset or divine mercy in it, the ...”

“... was after political disgrace, looking for a turncoat Hurd, a Pym, a Raison, a Jopling. What was a Wood? We had no family connections, to Eton or anywhere else much. The only reason I was at the school was my mother’s madly aspirant zeal, her Scottish petit-bourgeois tirelessness. My older brother and I were both effectively scholarship boys. He was the real ...”

“... The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth from childhood to manhood, and the father’s from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship ...”

“... but which turned out to be a marathon. The pack thins and the stayers are revealed in the lead (Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and Adrian Berg, for example). With so many of the tedious political attitudes of the artists of the Sixties discredited, those who have been slow to slough them off (following Kitaj’s example once again) have found themselves ...”

“... flitter off into Fine Writing. In 1979, Too Far to Go was adapted into a television film starring Michael Moriarty and the divine Blythe Danner that still holds up today, if you can find it.The​ longest, purest romance of Updike’s life was with the New Yorker, which began as an ‘adolescent crush’ – pre-adolescent, really: ‘I fell in love with the ...”

“... well, the fuel, along with the body beneath it, was trampled underfoot. Chambort ‘packed the wood down with his foot’ and ‘danced precariously’ atop the pile ... Young Campot also danced about and raised his arms while shouting ‘Vive I’Empéreur!’ ... [The] men displayed a ‘fierce joy’, and those closest to the fire fanned the flames. The ...”

“... science is thin, like the layer of living tissue below the bark of a tree. It is supported by the wood of old ideas (all wood is, strictly speaking, dead). As time passes, what was the surface is overlaid by new work and itself becomes part of the wood. Distances on the surface get ...”

“... In February​ 2018, 120 women detainees at Yarl’s Wood Immigrant Removal Centre began a one-month work and hunger strike. Several received letters from the Home Office informing them that their deportation would not be delayed by their action, in fact it was more likely to be brought forward. Serco, the private company that runs Yarl’s Wood, denied that the hunger strike was taking place ...”