“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the Barbarians, to the desire for ultimate anonymity and inscrutability in Life & Times of Michael K, or Mrs Curran’s abject retraction of her past in Age of Iron, or the haughty refusal to confess to the politically correct commission of inquiry into sexual harassment in Disgrace: ‘What goes on in my mind is my business, not yours.’ Coetzee has ...”

“... shared a building with National Lampoon. Kincaid struck up a conversation with one of its writers, Michael O’Donoghue, who suggested she meet his friend George Trow, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Trow organised a lunch with Kincaid and William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker, at the Algonquin. Kincaid ordered the most expensive item on the menu ...”

“... women wore the distinctive headscarves of the Muslim Hui of Ningxia and Gansu. On the kang was the wood-burning grill for the kebabs, to be accompanied by bottles of Xinjiang beer. The conversation revolved round the success of the recent date harvest. The atmosphere recalled the communes or state farms of the 1950s, an impression that was reinforced at five ...”

“... angel carrying a lamb. The horde of model tortoises collected by Eleanor, his hostess, made from wood and glass and brass and steel and bean-bags, tortoises with zips and tortoise jelly-moulds. The complete titles of many books about how to build your own cabin which he finds in a cabin west of Winnipeg. The seemingly exhaustive transcript of the ...”

“... McCluskie remains in prison. It is customary to think of long sentences and long stretches as Michael Howard’s contribution to British penal policy, but he is merely the latest in a long, if occasionally interrupted, line of social conservatives with a particular interest in correction. When, in October 1993, he announced to the Conservative Party ...”

“... pallid discipline. His is a rich and stimulating book, and we are all in the debt of Christopher Wood and Zone Books. I cannot say the same for the rather inaccurately named Language of Art History, which is merely an anthology of philosophical writings on art, together with an example, certainly admirable, by Richard Schiff of what ...”

“... authenticity of the style. Take ‘Idylls of the King’ from Tenebrae: The pigeon purrs in the wood; the wood has gone; dark leaves that flick to silver in the gust, and the marsh-orchids and the heron’s nest, goldgrimy shafts and pillars of the sun. Weightless magnificence upholds the past. Cement recesses smell of ...”

“... War, the last and by far the worst ending with a nightmarish experience of panic and gas in Mametz Wood, on the Somme, which left him unfit for further front-line service. In proportion as the Army’s hold on him weakened, his critical interest in its mentality and methods increased. He began to write about training and tactics and at once was noted for the ...”

“... out money, every day he chartered a different sleigh, he took the edge off winter, he distributed wood and coal, bread and herrings, tea and lard, he bought Madeira for the sick, and in short he warmed the world like a hundred summers. When he went away, he left a lot of happy people behind, but he didn’t look as fresh as he had when he arrived: he was ...”