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“... in the cold. Another downer is the smell, which one worker described to her as ‘cardboard, wood, foam insulation, oil, and what I always just think of as the smell of cold’. Before reading Twilley’s book, I had imagined that these places wouldn’t smell of anything much. But apparently some frozen foods are surprisingly pungent and can transfer ...”

“... to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps ...”

“... places, in each other’s presence. That is the impression one gets from such excellent poems as Michael Longley’s ‘The Linen Workers’ and Derek Mahon’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn’. In 1962, in The New Poetry, there were poems of similar kind and distinction, such as ‘A Peasant’, by R.S. Thomas, and Iain Crichton-Smith’s ‘Old Woman’. All four ...”

“... concentration, chewy, highly extracted flavours of black fruits, iron, earth and spicy wood’) with Andrew Jefford in the Financial Times on a Georges Duboeuf 2003 cru Beaujolais (‘This dark wine … helicopters into the mouth with spinning blades of intense fruit,’ combining ‘finesse and elegance with near-beefy depth’), or with the Wall ...”

“... up on a stump farm just north of Seattle. He delivered milk for his father. He learned how to chop wood, how to use a two-handled saw. Tools were important to him, the right kit for the right job. In Kitkitdizze, there are tools everywhere, racks and stacks of them, useful objects respected like artworks. Blades, chisels, axes, boots, helmets, guns. The actor ...”

“... for Ossian saw the publication of the important Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood. In the late 18th century there was a revival of serious education in the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers of those able to read Greek ...”

“... to the complexity of its organisation. The ending of ‘Morpho Eugenia’ made me think of Michael Heseltine. The story opened up the deep mines of the realist novel only to shut them down with the ruthless logic of allegory and fable. William Adamson, the son of a Yorkshire Methodist butcher, is an entomologist who has spent ten years in the Amazon ...”

“... of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition at that time, mostly crumbling tenements, more than half of them without an inside bath and with a loo on the stairs.Just west of Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the ...”

“... combines the horrific and naturist elements with a much admired account of a grisly sacrificial wood, allegedly destroyed by Caesar in person, thereby overcoming his soldiers’ superstitious fears. Tacitus provides possibly the most striking image of all, as the army of Suetonius Paulinus halts on the shore facing the island of Mona (Anglesey), awed by an ...”

“... of the placebo effect). In the 1950s, when botany was still taught in the medical curriculum, Michael Balint wrote that contact with therapists can itself be thought of as a kind of drug, distinct from any treatments therapists actually prescribe. ‘All physicians, therefore, yourselves included, are continually practising psychotherapy,’ Freud ...”

“... spent the day with ‘their trousers tucked up, groping about picking out pieces of coal, iron, wood and copper nails’ from the mud on the banks of the Thames. Unlike the street-sellers, whose lives were solitary, the mudlarks formed organised communities. But they were loosely connected. Indeed, Mayhew noted their lack of cohesiveness, observing that ...”

“... quantity, and more for observation than vision. But in 1927, 45 years after Trollope’s death, Michael Sadleir published a reassessment. He argued that Trollope was a writer with the rare gift of being able to produce memorable books without writing memorable sentences, and probe depths without seeming to move beyond the surface. Interest revived; the ...”

“... Kamala Harris was endorsed by most of George W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final ...”

“... were allowed to go … It just seemed amazingly exciting.’ While there, he had an affair with Michael Wishart, who was 18 – Freud was 23 – and a nephew of a woman Freud had been close to, and a cousin of the woman who would be his first wife. Wishart, who became a painter, would marry Anne Dunn, who was also a lover of Freud’s. In Paris he worked on ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”