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“... When John Muir, the son of an emigrant from East Lothian to southern Wisconsin, was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water ...”

“... travelled since the universe cooled enough to give them free passage. In this neck of the cosmic woods, life may not be all that rare. Rees estimates that even our own galaxy carries millions of Earth-like planets. Admittedly, failure to detect extraterrestrials suggests that most of the planets are ‘Earth-like’ only in offering suitable ...”

“... another five years, despite continuing tensions over loan repayments and the warning of its boss, John Hope Simpson, a former Indian Civil Service official, that the ‘unpleasant duty’ of debt collection and mass evictions would ‘probably lead to revolution’. Yet the League continued to roll out unpopular debt-led development projects. In the early ...”

“... save his Chelsea friends from heroin addiction and himself from taking his chances in West Beirut; John Chadwick, who leaves the City to pay for the running-costs of his wife’s damp and dilapidated house in Italy with dodgy investments and asset sales, in Davy Chadwick; Richard Verey in Slide, after spells in the Foreign Service and on Wall ...”

“... necessarily, self-servingly clueless about what really happened in Vietnam, In the Lake of the Woods is that strangest of all mysteries, the whodunnit in which the puzzle apparently remains unsolved. Did O’Brien’s protagonist, John Wade, murder his wife? Or not? And what happens to Wade himself? O’Brien does not ...”

“... of the house, towards what I liked to think of as open country, the fields ran away to the strip woods, in one direction, and the grey, leechy waters of Loch Fitty, in the other, and I wandered out there whenever I could, imagining myself a child of the countryside, like the boys in picture books, or one of the chums from the Rupert annuals my Auntie Sall ...”

“... version of pastoral is more fashionable than ever. ‘In a time of informational overload,’ John Updike wrote in an introduction to Walden, ‘of clamorously inane and ubiquitous electronic entertainment, and of a fraught, globally challenged and ever more demanding workplace, the urge to build a cabin in the ...”

“... that poem is in some ways the centrepiece of Vendler’s book. The trouble is there’s more to John Ashbery than ‘The Painter’, ‘Drunken Americans’ and his other disquisitions on the Reflective Sublime. To compare Vendler’s choice with Ashbery’s, in the invaluable Selected Poems, is to find a troubling divergence. She gives us nothing, for ...”

“... a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on the editorial floor, when Evans declared that he was not resigning ...”

“... that she radically undermines traditional masculine values. In another centenary study, however, John Robinson insists that she is a timeless lyric poet whose work is not ‘centrally representative of women’. Robinson’s refusal to consider Dickinson’s polemical and subversive imagination is disappointing, but it can be argued that certain writers ...”

“... led her to put such effort into paring herself down to the bone – as in the line from a poem by John Hewitt: ‘A tree is truer for its being bare.’ However, when it comes to her ‘recalling’ a rape by a motorcycle gang, even Josie concedes that it may have all been in her head: ‘A common fantasy among young women, so I’m told.’ What did happen ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”

“... a chain of consequences runs through the book. In the first ‘January Man’, the lake in the woods has frozen over, and all the village teenagers have gone down to play British bulldogs on the ice. In a couple of pages, ‘twenty or twenty-five of us boys, plus Dawn Madden’ are introduced to the reader in a bewildering welter of names: Dean Moran, Nick ...”

“... my tail,’ and she does, and the children run away in terror, and exist miserably in the dark woods, sometimes seeing from their old home a flash of light from the glass eyes, and hearing the thump of the wooden tail. Almost everything fearful in growing up is present in the story, though never explicit. Lucy Lane Clifford came to England from Barbados ...”

“... this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?’ This passage was left out of the original text of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, because Keynes felt that he had tried and failed to do justice to the British prime minister’s baffling complexity of character. Lloyd George ...”