“... time, Even the rocks,’ she read, ‘will change their shape.’ She doubted it. One day in May, Miss Frith Lifted her eyes from all the labels on The labelling desk, and put down her brush, And observed that the dust in the still air Was thinner than it had been. It was quiet, The builders gone and the renovations Finished till the next ...”

“... come to hate round and round the camp like a bum. I think I’m going to say I want to leave you. May I be smothered in sweet pollen, flowers of the morning, morning flowers. I want to leave you. The hearts on the shutters make the houses look like cuckoo clocks, or little chalets – can you hear the cowbells tinkle? – where Mother Bear and Father Bear eat ...”

“... go-sees I realise I must have seen them at least half a dozen times before. On other occasions it may be a totally new, untried fresh face that comes hesitantly through my door. Alas, Noelle is one of the hardy perennials who has been going on go-sees for years with very little to show for it. When I was going through her book I asked how old she was. She ...”

“... the bow, tapped softly on the bridge, imagined I heard a voice in the soft harmonics. A Tattoo It may be slow, but something works for change beneath the collarbone, behind the eyes; and something more is waiting to be found: whether we bring to the surface a pure Vesalian blue, or let the animals beneath the skin emerge, in a web of crimson and ...”

“... to us. Was it the innocence of youth to think an angel told the legal truth? The cat of veracity may have had its claws retracted, but we knew its powerful paws: we’d seen the ruins, and the ships on fire; I met a boy from Belsen, and a man maltreated by the aesthetes from Japan. The cat of history, fed but not for hire, sits on Big Brother at its own ...”

“... short Words which my command of Danish didn’t extend to But which sobered him up right away, he may even have Stumbled a bit, he was dancing too, after all. That Was it for him, he ends here. Art Buchwald, now, though, That really brings a lot back. I used to imagine being him, Living in Paris and writing even more wittily than he did, Columns about ...”

“... letters we couldn’t decipher out where the trailers had stood at the edge of the night and the May Queen was lost for hours before she was missed, her mother asleep after back-shift, her father a rumour, a story the woman would tell of a distant summer; idealised, hazy at best, he had left her one morning at dawn for the Sanskrit of rain. Go far ...”

“... a Pictish road. Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Lonker: a hole in a wall, a yett through which Sheep may slip, or a burn, a stream flow under. Every wall, from Hadrian’s to dry-stane dyke, Longs for a lonker’s Huddled, nervous rush of living fleece Against its whinstane, a vindauga, a wind’s eye, a window To see through, snow’s gurgling, flushing ...”

“... waters of our particular rivers, and this terrible readiness to worry about your own family first, may be the least of our problems but I think my daughter, my daughter, how is she going to deal with ...”

“... Jowell, who keeps rattling the charter, then pretending she hasn’t. She needs to be watched: she may be a weasel in talcum powder. One person who saw it coming was Ludovic Kennedy who, hearing Hutton named to head the inquiry, correctly predicted the outcome. I looked up the judge, then Sir Brian Hutton, in Kennedy’s Thirty-Six Murders, where he pinpoints ...”

“... alone inside of her house on the headland.The alcove the old woman sits in features objects that may impress her guests – except that through time she, herself, has been well humbled.*Her son enters the room to say, ‘You are so rude to me!’‘Yes, I am,’ she says. ‘Where is Neddie?’‘Napping’.‘Please leave me be,’ she says.Then Neddie can ...”

“... elated? – enamoured? – drunk? – their effect on me is wholly pleasing.Area of SurpriseShe may have been on the brink, whatever that means.She had set her teeth upon the edge of it – a gift from me – her lavaliere, that she next swung side to side, even as its chain cut into her throat.And I guess everybody knows how to fall in love. I did and I ...”

“... is known of what went on in these interviews, except that the three men were not cautioned. It may be assumed that whatever they said convinced neither the Sharples team nor the DPP that there was an innocent explanation for the rough typed notes because the DPP then requested a hearing before the Court of Appeal. On 19 October, Roy Amlot, counsel for the ...”

“... French ‘naturalists’ – these prose ‘scientists’, these ‘reporters’ – and they may have helped him onto a new footing. Back in London he went into the streets and was keen for the first time to capture passers-by and their shadows. He was ‘oppressed and depressed’ that summer, and his essay for Longman’s grew out of all of these ...”

“... is necessary both to understand and to prosecute a certain culture of wrongdoing. And you may have noticed that those who are too quick to shout ‘conspiracy theorist’ are equally swift, when consequences for authority and consensus impend, to look serious and say: ‘It’s more complicated than that.’ These have become standard damage-control ...”