“... for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of epiphany (Charlton Heston breaking down at the sight of the half-buried Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes is ...”

“... is not, and the episode is told from Stan’s point of view – seem to enter the territory of Michael Haneke’s Caché, but Ridgway’s story is subtler, less gothic. Stan always knows who’s sending the pictures; eventually he confronts Gary, who works in B&Q but is trying to make it as a photographic chronicler of the everyday. Stan feels wrongly ...”

“... as Lucas points out, has produced a flourishing literature of poems about arguments about wood – ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, but see also Harley MS 2253, ‘the wodeward waiteth us wo that loketh under rys’ – as of poems about enclosures and deserted villages and customary rights, or poems about felled poplars (Cowper), fallen elms ...”

“... abound. Dead Men’s Morris (1936) – reissued in the ‘Classic Collection’ marking Michael Joseph’s 50th anniversary – is quite untypically straightforward and subdued, though it isn’t without moments of ebullience. One of these occurs when the elderly detective, needing assistance to get her nephew Carey out of a predicament in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the term ‘Elves’, as also for his shabby dealing with the splendid notion of Great Birnam wood advancing upon high Dunsinane hill. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature admits with some complacency to ‘not being specially well read in modern English’ and to ‘no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”