“... in the Latin mass, gleeful when I heard the ‘Ite, missa est,’ I hurried to the nearby woods to blast away at beer cans or paper targets. Father Burns sighed whenever he saw me stowing my bolt-action Mossberg .22 calibre rifle in my locker and slipping on my cassock and surplice. But he accepted it, because I was in the church-sponsored Boy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his stories – his best ones – are about going fishing as a boy, just heading off into the woods and rain with his rod and reel. Brautigan’s prose writings are occasionally grouped with those of certain of his contemporaries – Barth, Coover, Vonnegut, Barthelme – under the rubric New Fiction. There is in Brautigan, as with the others, what Borges ...”

“... Coming through the woods, down a soft winding track, two minutes shy of the time we have been instructed to arrive, 10 a.m. on a bright Sunday morning, we see the man already there in the clearing, his right hand on the dog’s collar. Two minutes later, you feel, and he’d be gone. But this is the right person, undoubtedly, the one we have come to see ...”

“... the wind; the soft, far pulse of something I couldn’t pin down coming through a stand of birch woods near Karasjoka; the cries of a drowned girl from centuries ago calling through the moans and rumblings of the Alta River at Pikefossen. This time, I was hoping to stand out on the high plain and listen to that thaw water music, but the hard cold had ...”

“... was ‘governess to the last of the tsars’ and another the friend of ‘the Methodist preacher John Wellesley’ (I should like to have known who this man was, provided he wasn’t John Wesley). The father began an autobiography under the thoughtlessly chosen title Diary of a Nobody, and the mother was devotedly ...”

“... world impinges on country-house society when a naked half-human boy lures a child away into the woods. The naked boy speaks like an Etonian. ‘“They are very nice woods,” said the boy, with a touch of patronage in his voice.’ And then: ‘It’s quite two months since I tasted child flesh.’ Saki wrote in the ...”

“... Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and John Coplans; the sculptors Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn; the painters Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; the performance and video artists Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Arnulf Rainer and Matthew Barney. Their work commonly ...”

“... to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord ...”

“... Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain completes a remarkable biography. No other biographer of Keynes is likely to surpass it, and everyone who has an interest in the intellectual and public life of this country is in Skidelsky’s debt. This third volume starts in 1937, where the second volume left off ...”

“... of Evans-Lewes made Bodichon willing to contemplate a ‘free union’ with Evans’s ex-partner John Chapman, the editor of the Westminster Review, which was nearly disastrous. In 1855, Chapman wrote a series of letters begging her to have sex with him and, if possible, marry him. Her father and brother discovered that he was in desperate need of her ...”

“... sister recommends long walks, and observes that she often sees fox’s dung while walking in the woods. ‘It’s grey,’ she goes on to tell them, ‘and pointed at both ends.’ In another novel some young male is made to remember with a shock ‘how sharp the nicest women are’. The nearest Pym’s diary comes to sharpness, in a culinary context, was ...”