“... would be broken. The present strike was sparked off by the announcement early in March that Corton-wood – a colliery to which miners had recently been transferred from elsewhere, with a promise that the pit had several years life ahead of it – was now destined for closure within a few months. There is a theory that this provocation was deliberately ...”

“... Mountjoy had consulted in 1597 (when she thought herself pregnant by a neighbouring mercer, Henry Wood), and of George Wilkins, the violent brothel-keeper-turned-author with whom Shakespeare cowrote his most innocent play, Pericles, and with whom the hapless Mary Belott née Mountjoy lodged for a while after her marriage. A.L. Rowse wrote about Forman in the ...”

“... of a perpetual motion machine, working independently of electricity, oil, water or coal, made of wood by an Albanian shepherd. Describing Herbert’s marriage to Mary Vesey, at which the bride had the support of 14 adult bridesmaids, all daughters of peers, she resists any temptation to say that it must have been funny as well as vulgar. It seems we could ...”

“... inside a Department – as in the case of what came to me from Clive Ponting. A careful look at Michael Heseltine’s lengthy broadcast evidence shows what exactly was taking place in the Whitehall stratosphere during the month in which Hilda Murrell was murdered. On 6 March Denzil Davies wrote to the Prime Minister, about discrepancies in Mrs Thatcher’s ...”

“... peasants.’) Sendero’s pedagogical origins made a difference too: as the American journalist Michael Smith argued in 1992, Sendero was able to spread ‘almost anywhere’ there was ‘a blackboard and benches’. In some ways, Sendero’s doctrinal inflexibility and its distance – physical and ideological – from the rest of the Peruvian left were ...”

“... which promoted Hughes and Plath over the stodgy Movement), Edward Lucie-Smith and, terrifyingly, Michael Horovitz, the editor of ‘one of the decade’s genuinely polemical anthologies: Children of Albion (1969)’. Stevenson’s fondness for Prynne over Larkin is less offensive than his reasons for dismissing Larkin, which betray a shallow ear. Larkin is ...”

“... The Stroke of Fire’, is the biography of a potter’s kiln in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon: a wood-burning Anagama kiln of Korean and Japanese design, in which firings can last as long as a month. Lopez’s research is characteristically thorough. He has investigated the history of the kiln and the physics of each firing. He has read Jack Troy’s ...”

“... sister, Lizzie, is alleged to have said. But that is rather the point, and A House in St John’s Wood is one of the best books I’ve read about not knowing your parents. What if you were just another of their haphazard decisions, subject to regret and contradiction? The drama of Stephen Spender is not that he was sometimes gay – there’s no news there ...”

“... And then, to go on in a slighdy different vein, doesn’t Goldsmith’s = CalArts and doesn’t Michael Craig Martin = Michael Asher, and therefore isn’t it only to be expected that Sensation = Helter Skelter and/or Scene of the Crime, to cite the two definitive exhibitions of new Los Angeles art. This is not to say ...”

“... Pass. He used both of them, but not at the same time. A few hundred yards short of the Abbey Wood terminal, where nobody wanted to go, the train made its traditional unexplained halt. It seems that another train was hogging the station. We waited. I relished the hum of mildly violated silence, of stalled construction, and the cool shadows creeping across ...”

“... more than he is): rather he is the poet of organic life, growth and decay, and particularly of wood and lumber and mulch, of red and green and brown leaves. Of ‘a house eats up the wood that made it,’ of ‘We live, two trees,’ of ‘the leaves light up, still green, this afternoon,/and burn to frittered ...”

“... word, come to think of it, sprang unbidden to the lips about half-way through the first act of Michael Hastings’s play Tom and Viv, now showing at the Royal Court. The play purports to be an account of T. S. Eliot’s first marriage, to Vivien Haigh-Wood, and I had been pretty well put off it by Peter Redgrove’s ...”

“... often see the traces of these earlier lives in shelfmarks. Books classified by the Bodleian as ‘Wood’, for example, once belonged to the gossipy antiquarian Anthony Wood (1632-95); ‘Douce’ means Francis Douce (1757-1834), keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, known for a bitter resignation letter of 1811 ...”

“... in a few paragraphs. She works, as she acknowledges, in the shadow of the extraordinary labours of Michael Millgate, whose revised biography of 2004 is the standard scholarly account. Millgate is invaluable, the definitive authority; but as he himself might admit, his very scrupulousness tends to slow down his narrative, gnarling it in necessary footnotes and ...”