“... Small waves splashed against the hull and the hollow creak of oarlock and oar rose into the woods of black pine crusted with lichen. I moved like a dark star, drifting over the drowned other half of the world until, by a distant prompting, I looked over the gunwale and saw beneath the surface a luminous room, a light-filled grave, saw for the first time ...”

“... dexterity the scene in Kes when we see Billy’s brutal older brother Jud walking through the woods to the colliery where he will spend another airless working day. Until that point, late in the picture, Jud has been one of the story’s bogeymen, along with the cynical shopkeepers and tyrannical teachers. But the tranquillity of this sequence, and the ...”

“... of their relationship Wendell and Frank have hidden from the world, living in a house in the woods, isolating themselves absolutely, perhaps implausibly, from their family, colleagues and friends. Time is slightly difficult to pin down in the novel, but the men meet sometime shortly after the Second World War: ‘You could tell he hadn’t been home long ...”

“... of real-life American stand-ups who’ve spectacularly scuttled their own careers (Louis C.K., Michael Richards), but the veniality of Manny’s ‘emotional misconduct’ (he slept with each of his accusers once, proposed marriage, then never called) suggests we’re not to dwell too much on them. Bordas wants to give him the trappings of disgrace without ...”

“... at the dark in strange lodging-houses. As a young woman, she had written verses about wild wet woods and drifted spirits, and become engaged to a young bank clerk. Her fiancé introduced her to her future husband. Hubert Bland was very big and very vain. The son of a Woolwich clerk, he sported a top hat, a black-ribboned monocle, and an aggressively ...”

“... A fox patrolled on its instinctive route Past us and nut trees to the absolute Wild pathless woods, a French fox, pure renard. There is a quality in Dunn’s imagination – perhaps a buried Calvinism – which makes him take instinctively to French language and culture. Thus ‘Creatures’ places its visionary delicacies (‘She scattered milk-dipped ...”

“... along with the sinister ‘underpresence’ of Senecan tragedy that Burrow traces in the Athenian woods – to undermine the smug condescension of Theseus and his courtly entourage. When Shakespeare revisited ancient Greece in Troilus and Cressida, he pushed this sly generic mixture to violent extremes, deforming his epic subject by yoking it to snarling ...”

“... equivalent ‘little bugger’, not as cowardly a substitution as the author of this biography, Michael Snyder, seems to think. ‘Motherfucker’ was taboo, but also unfamiliar in a British context. ‘Bugger’ was a robust stand-in.Snyder starts his book with Sitwell’s epiphany but acknowledges the exaggeration behind Purdy’s claim that she had saved ...”

“... not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms of a growing pie.’ That is why they become rich. And ...”

“... Texas supermax. ‘Either conditions will improve, or we will starve to death,’ insisted Steven Woods, one of the prisoners. The New York Times reported that the lawyers of those involved in yet another hunger strike that began at Guantánamo this April noted the desperation of clients who had been moved to the new supermax, Camp VI, built by a Halliburton ...”

“... danger, from which they were saved only by his death seven years later. Our author and his son Michael were born in the safety of South Africa and England only because the rabbi’s untimely demise left a penniless widow and nine children with no means of support and no choice but to emigrate. Of course, Heshel could not have known what was coming, and ...”

“... Still, there is only one staggering omission. He describes the genesis of physiology under Michael Foster but never mentions Adrian, Hodgkin or Huxley, all Nobel Laureates and masters of Trinity, who immediately after the war worked in the most prestigious biological department which pullulated with FRS. The greatest change in social life? Brooke is in ...”

“... of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the North, the two languages, the available rhetorics. I have been reading The Crane Bag in association with Hugh Kenner’s new book, A ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a ‘very profitable market in military equipment’, in the words of the then foreign secretary, Michael Stewart. Even now, a striking number of Middle East rulers are graduates of Sandhurst, including the kings of Bahrain and Jordan, the sultan of Oman, the emir of Dubai, the emir and crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the emir of Qatar, and the late emir of ...”