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“... wonders which was which,’ Grigson writes. An orangutan was called a ‘wild man of the wood’; a ‘woman-tyger’ or ‘man-tyger’ was a mandrill; and a ‘child of the sun’ was a baboon. One baboon caused a stir in 1784, overshadowing even Mrs Siddons’s stage performances. The ‘Siddonian rage’ was displaced by ‘savage ...”

“... up in her propeller and she had to cut herself free while also keeping her wildly juddering balsa-wood craft under control, she defeated the world-class German racer Herr Krueger and became an instant national heroine. (‘Shingled Girl Beats German’ was the Daily Mail’s headline the next day.) As she piled up victory after victory over the next two years ...”

“... holed up in mountain, bog and forest, some Irish Tories were rumoured to be popular champions or Robin Hood figures, genteel Catholic Jacobites who had squandered or forfeited their estates and now robbed the rich to give to the poor. Most of them, however, made do more modestly with simply robbing the rich. Like many an Irish dissident, they had no ardent ...”

“... and monks. More usually, they related to kings and queens, armies and battles, or folk heroes like Robin Hood, Guy of Warwick and, above all, King Arthur, to whom, according to the Elizabethan historian William Camden, ‘the common sort ascribe whatever is ancient or strange’. Cairns, cromlechs and barrows were believed to be memorials to ancient princes or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a properly mythological bird – a latter-day Philomel or Procne – or a relative of the kitsch robin at the end of Blue Velvet? The edginess here, the feeling that one way of making sense could at any time be overturned by its opposite, is Landing Light’s most vivid and interesting tone. Less alive – and less involving – are poems where ...”

“... references – and others would have gone up in the fires that commonly broke out in the crowded wood-built cities. The losses are heaviest among the first wave of playmakers working in London in the late 1580s and early 1590s, the so-called ‘pre-Shakespearean’ period. Not a single play by the sonneteer Thomas Watson remains, though he was described in ...”

“... to you, –      Do you remember the picture-book thievesWho left two children sleeping in a wood the long night through,      And how the birds came down and covered them with leaves?So you and I should have slept, – But now,      Oh, what a lonely head!With just the shadow of a waving bough      In the moonlight over your bed.It’s ...”

“... as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the generic figure ...”

“... poems of the period, ‘The Wall’, describes a journey from his first territory, a wood ‘whose Grimm’s tale shadow terrified but made / A Place to hide in’ to an ‘ambushed Well’, where his ‘gaze hung in depths beneath the real / And sought the secret source of nothingness / Until I tired of its Circean spell.’ He then tries to ...”

“... comes some painfully literary poetry which furnishes praise for the great and famous dead. ‘The Wood’ proposes to console us for             whatever falls apart In the chaos of these times by invoking three poets in a tone which unintentionally flatters and patronises:        Wordsworth who fills The stern mould of all Westmorland ...”

“... amid the jingoistic clamour of 1914. Nor is there anything bland or scrubbed-up about Davies’s robin, a creature more terrifying than Ted Hughes’s thrush (‘He sings in triumph that last night/He killed his father in a fight;/And now he’ll take his mother’s blood’), or his description of fields as ‘dewy cemeteries … white with mushroom ...”

“... that a moment in 2013, when Prynne could be seen fleetingly on Celebrity Masterchef being served wood pigeon by Les Dennis, might be regarded as a serendipitous objective correlative for this phenomenon.) Appreciation, on the other hand, remains as tricky as ever. The easiest criticism of Prynne’s work has always been that it doesn’t make sense. Many ...”

“... shaving soap in a wooden bowl, the City office with highly polished desk and leather blotters and wood panelling and the secretary in an anteroom who patched us through on the telephone, the beautifully trimmed Rover Coupé with crackled leather seats, the subscription to the Spectator, the pot of Gentleman’s Relish in the fridge.What you think you ...”

“... In the Great War he was wounded five times, at the Battle of Loos and at the Somme. At Delville Wood he was hit in the thigh and pelvis and rolled down into a large shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus. He wrote home on 13 September 1916 that ‘the stench from the dead bodies which ...”