“... The membership of environmental organisations in Britain is double that of the political parties and three times that of Sunday worshippers in the Church of England. Each of us has some links with the green movement and each of these books reflect one or other of these concerns. Everyone outside the farming industry is outraged by its subsidised destruction of woodlands, hedges, wetlands and wildlife, as well as by the pollution of water sources by nitrogenous fertilisers ...”

“... taller buildings, hotels of magnificence, a convention centre. In Watsonville the City Manager, John Radin, toured the streets, civil engineer in tow. Radin dreams of a Watsonville renewed in the image of Santa Rosa, a metastasising node on the lymph glands running north from San Francisco. To observant citizens there seemed to be a politically coherent ...”

“... Private Gardens of London. Written by a landscape gardener, and beautifully photographed by John Miller, the book’s focus is a series of nearly forty gardens from different parts of the metropolis. The Museum of London’s scheme to collect pictures and photographs of London gardens will surely result in a more representative sample, but this is a ...”

“... parents had a nerve, to call him Cassius’. To appreciate this we need to recall the assassin John Wilkes Booth and his father, also an actor, whose forenames were Junius Brutus. This is characteristic of Carter’s allusiveness, and of her masterly interweaving of history and fiction. One would have to be the most devoted of theatre buffs to get out of ...”

“... since the abandonment of an East of Suez role in the Sixties. The last such attempt was made by John Nott just before the Falklands War. 5. Out-of-area capabilities. The White Paper emphasises the need to retain a ‘national capability to deal with contingencies outside the Nato area’, such as the Gulf War. It describes the deployment of troops in the ...”

“... chip.’ Wilson had little to say about the pencil: what it achieved was too ephemeral. Nor did John Middleton Murry in his book called Pencillings, where despite his title, he left the pencil alone: instead, he included one chapter on ‘The Golden Pen’. It was left to Nabokov to produce an alternative view of the writer’s contribution to history from ...”

“... Am I eccentric?’ Edward James once asked me in the days before I was added to his long list of enemies both real and imaginary. ‘I suppose I am, but I don’t mean to be. I’ve always tried to behave like everyone else.’ We were sitting on the platform of one of the inevitably incomplete concrete follies he was building at enormous expense on a hillside he owned by proxy in a Mexican jungle ...”

“... and it reads well, though some may reasonably continue to prefer the recent translation by John McDowell in the Clarendon Plato ...”

“... perhaps to begin with, there was the matter of whether ‘the Lobby’ would be defeated at last. John Sununu, the bulbous Arab-American frequent flier, was reported to have been rebuked for gloating on this point by Brent Scowcroft, the gaunt WASP Cold Warrior and all-purpose strategist. Time and again I’d heard Jordanians and Palestinians be wistful about ...”

“... much of the grimly persuasive work leading up to it. The Frankie of the title was once called John: he’s a grotesquely blotched and ugly writer of horror novels who adopted his monstrous nickname while still at school, as part of a strategy of self-protection which also led him to discover the power he could wield by inventing repulsive stories (‘Do ...”

“... There are less unexpected points in the other essays and it is a pity that one of them claims John Knox as the father of Scottish Presbyterianism, and another contrasts ‘history’ with ‘herstory’. Points can be made without insulting the English language. From Glasgow Presbytery in 1960 comes a remark on women’s ordination: ‘every religion ...”

“... body to body, remains consistent. ‘It was not sex,’ but neither (to pick up an echo from John Donne) was it a mixing of souls. In ‘The Missing’, Gunn writes of his friends as ‘an involved increasing family’ (another family) of gay lovers: Contact of friend led to another friend, Supple entwinement through the living mass Which for all that I ...”

“... looks pretty lively in Late Medieval Britain, including most tomb effigies pictured here; even Sir John Golafre’s grisly skeleton in its shroud has lost its power to concentrate our minds on the Great Leveller, if that is what it was intended to do – I have my doubts. I also have them concerning the opposite case. Mr Platt’s admirable discussion of the ...”

“... specific, criticising Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby for presenting Margaret Drabble and John Le Carré as ‘most important writers’. He goes on to reproach the same critics for appealing to a ‘supposed consensus’ and for the use of the phrase ‘our time’, which Hill glosses as ‘your time made placable to our cultural ...”

“... and rewarding job. He gravitated gently to Sydney, Australia, where he became a friend of the Rev. John McKnight, a rector in a slum area. Under McKnight’s influence, he moved towards Christian ideas. He liked the way McKnight applied his religion to the real world, and shared the rector’s horror of nuclear weapons. ‘Christians,’ said ...”