“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from Calypso is cobbled together from a few bits of driftwood (in contrast to the elaborate wood-chopping and shipbuilding in Homer). We don’t see the design or construction of the Trojan Horse; instead, a kitsch, poorly designed horse (with no wheels) appears on the windswept beach as if dumped there by drone. The difficulties of transporting ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it happens, used to be a baby-sitter for us, when her parents lived next door to us in St John’s Wood. As we say in writing to congratulate her, when one’s baby-sitter is a cabinet minister one realises one is really old!21 May 1997. Howard Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the ...”

“... regulations of no avail as Railtrack claim public safety as a justification. If it happened to a wood that I was fond of I’d be inclined to find out the address of the local Railtrack manager, take along a chainsaw and do the same to his precious plot. 30 March. To Petersfield on a cold, blue day, the traffic thick over Hammersmith Bridge, where crowds are ...”

“... or worse? Interesting as these questions are, if you focus on them too narrowly you can miss the wood for the trees. Some of Donne’s best religious poems have nothing to do with inter or intra-confessional controversy or division. ‘If Poisonous Minerals’ points out how strange it is that Christianity’s threat of eternal torture applies only to ...”

“... about her), while Peter wrote his poem of wetness and ‘Wallow’ entitled ‘Water-Witch, Wood-Witch, Wine-Witch’, annotating it with a manuscript that makes clear it was about Dilly. Redgrove took up a teaching post at the School of Art in Falmouth in 1966; he and Barbara were still together and he continued his affairs with Dilly and with ...”

“... mentality.’ ‘We just want to save resources,’ said Martin, with a sigh. ‘It’s more of a Robin Hood model – we’re stealing from the corporations. We found a bin today with fifty or sixty cartons of milk inside.’ Everything Alf and Martin own is in the van. They sleep in the back and they don’t have sex with anyone. I asked Alf if there ...”

“... blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.‘The murder of the ice-cream man violates all nature,’ Longley said in an interview, and his poem is wonderfully mindful of the ...”

“... along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel Beau-Site was commandeered by the French government and turned into a hospital. This, together with the wartime rent controls imposed on landlords, made the family ...”

“... profound experience of Clare’s childhood. One morning he went to gather rotten sticks from the wood, then decided ‘to wander about the fields’. He gazed over the yellow furze of Emmonsales Heath, and imagined, he says in his autobiography, ‘that the world’s end was at the edge of the horizon and that a day’s journey was able to find it’. He ...”

“... the Frederica quartet, was a kind of internal geography. Over on the left, in the darkness, is the wood where the smooth-between-the-legs Alexander is not quite managing to make it happen with the frustrated housewife Jenny, released into the ache of the unattainable by her part in the play being put on at Long Royston. Up in the tower is the evasive poet ...”

“... likes of a woman wouldn’t go in the Red Lamp.My grandfather knows about English things such as Robin Hood and Harvest Festival; I sit on his knee as he hums ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. My grandmother says: ‘George, teaching that child Protestant hymns!’ I dip my finger in his beer to taste it. For high days I have a thimble-sized glass to ...”