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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that he might show signs of having been influenced by the Fugitives; indeed, the shades of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate seem to hover around many of the earlier poems in this volume, poems with titles like ‘Ladies by Their Windows’, ‘Landscape with Little Figures’, ‘Beyond the Hunting Woods’, ‘On ...”

“... draws     down her funds in Girls Gone Wild. Santino’s now   a vampire (Suck and swoon!). John Hurrell receives some surprising new information. Marius makes Armand a virgin   when Armand is seventeen, and Akasha’s like, that’s so     random! Who’s your secret server? After ingesting   derivatives Magnus too becomes a vampire. Anthony ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first ...”

“... they discerned the ‘colouring’ and ‘diction’ of Shakespeare’s younger contemporary John Fletcher, rather than Shakespeare himself, in the play. Others objected that as for ‘the tale of this play being built upon a novel in Don Quixote, chronology is against us, and Shakespeare could not be the author.’ This last, at least, Theobald was able ...”

“... and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich head-dress. A noble tomb. His son John was also many times MP. As Sir William sat as fellow MP for Oxford with Thomas Chaucer, I was naturally on familiar terms with him and startled even Rowse by giving his alabaster cheek a great smacking kiss. To the north of the north aisle of the short nave ...”

“... Field’ (1939) It could have survived perfectly well. Perhaps it did, in John Nash’s (Paul’s younger brother) re-doings of Constable country, or Stanley Spencer’s topographies of Cookham. Landscape painting had always been, essentially and productively, nostalgic: the cult of ruins had mutated, on the whole without pain, into a ...”