“... though it’s fine if you like a bit of crenellated cream puffery. But I love the hills and woods of the Balmoral estate, the restrained charisma of the River Dee as it winds through the farmland of Crathie. The ‘scenery became prettier & prettier’, Queen Victoria wrote on her first trip to Balmoral, ‘& there is much agriculture & cultivation ...”

“... darkest selves could take shape through the mediation of the supernatural forces lurking in the woods. But it was also a kind of idyll, remote from the world and subject to stylish, fetishistic 1950s-retro art direction. The timelessness now feels a little of its time (apart from a Native American cop/tracker and a Chinese femme fatale, the town was wholly ...”

“... like 18th-century parkland):A Landskip the most pleasing that can be design’d, varied with woods and plains and Rocks and vallies, and falls of water and all the wild beauties of nature. Into one of the rocks the Entrance of a Cave must appear, not far from which Prospero and Miranda are to stand as in conference together … The Grotesque figure of ...”

“... did so expertly on existing myths of national identity and history. Not until now, however, with Michael Bartholomew’s biography, has much been known about Morton. Bartholomew’s book is an unexpectedly enlightening read. It turns out that the narrator of Morton’s travel books was an invention of their author, whose own life, personality, views and ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... not understand how the old religion, which made of the coming and going of the greenness of the woods and the fruitfulness of the fields a part of its worship, lives side by side with the new religion.’ Nature, witches and matriarchy formed a complex of which many disapproved, and it was pushed into remote places. Who knew what those peasants were doing ...”

“... On 18 July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered ...”

“... be fat to resist the riverside mud. Fred turned the hubs out of great lumps of elm, one of the few woods tough enough to withstand the stress of use in the fields. A circle of interconnected ash felloes capped the spokes, forming the circumference of the wheel. The final component was the tyre, made of a loop of iron, half an inch thick. It was placed in the ...”

“... feint, suggesting that the Fugitive Slave Act must be truly monstrous if he had needed to quit the woods to denounce it. Marcus makes clear however that Emerson was slower to move on abolitionism than Lidian or many Unitarian ministers. He was incurious about his family’s past entanglement with slavery. Although he celebrated Concord’s militiamen for ...”

“... in, but then they would be barely noticeable: they wouldn’t register as a subject. The poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley published a book in 2011 called Edgelands, including chapters titled ‘Cars’, ‘Paths’, ‘Dens’, ‘Containers’, ‘Landfill’, ‘Sewage’, ‘Wire’; but this was a series of essays, championing the ...”

“... what the final poem in North (1975) calls ‘Exposure’. In this fraught lyric, Heaney is in the woods of Wicklow, ‘feeling/Every wind that blows’; but physical exposure bothers him less than media exposure in Belfast, where journalists pumped him for his views on the conflict. Though safe now in the Republic, he is still distracted by the friends who ...”

“... At the same time as the foundation of the World Bank and the IMF was being discussed in Bretton Woods, delegates from more than fifty countries met in Chicago to create the International Civil Aviation Organisation. It set out a series of ‘freedoms’ of international civil air travel, many of which are not freedoms but restrictions, because the Chicago ...”

“... of a family name such as Bellegueule is a challenge to even the most skilful translator. Michael Lucey opts for ‘Prettymug’, which is as close as English gets: a man with ‘une belle gueule’ tends to be rugged and macho, while one with ‘un beau visage’ is handsome in a more standard fashion. When combined with Eddy (very much not ...”

“... menses’, and the nightmare variety act continues until her suicide on Christmas Day 1972, in the woods outside Stella Maris, the Wisconsin psychiatric clinic where she has been a patient for two months. The Kid is vulgar and obnoxious. He calls her ‘Birdtits’, among other insults. He taunts her about her family, her studies in mathematics, her plans to ...”

“... thanks for the persimmons … Wild persimmons make one feel like a hungry man in the woods. As I ate them, I thought of opossums and birds, and the antique Japanese prints in black and white, in which monkeys are eating persimmons in bare trees.’ To his young Cuban poet friend José Rodríguez Feo, for whom, admittedly, he played down the ...”