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“... those who belong to it. Shepherds were supposed to have hunted down and murdered Merlin in these woods; the valley was home to Michael Scott, a wizard who appears in Dante’s Inferno. The area was in unruly border country, and it is also on the spine of Scotland, where the waters divide to flow west or east. James ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... In his autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle certain coke bottles in an empty six-pack while he was out of the room for a couple of minutes ...”

“... in its home market, and it comes to the British reader with a warm endorsement from exile Donald Woods. The main contention of A Separate Development is that apartheid is a laughing matter. It presents itself as a comic monologue, delivered by Henry Moto. Moto, as we first meet him, is a coloured who passes for white. Later he is a white who masquerades as ...”

“... a medieval one,’ Scarfe wrote in 1972 – he was referring to the size of its fields and woods, and how they related to villages and towns. In English Hours, Henry James wrote about the ‘old usual rural things’ he came across as he bicycled close to the east coast. ‘Part of the charm of one’s exposure to them is that they ask one to rise to ...”

“... is attached to Cecil ‘in the Cambridge way’, someone notes. When the pair sneak off to the woods for sex, the poet calls their grapplings ‘a bit of Oxford style’. ‘I have a horrible habit, anathema to polite society, which can only decently be pursued out of doors, under cover of darkness,’ Cecil announces after dinner, producing a cigar ...”

“... Since I have seen him clear, Whether he fondle a golden mare Which he has ridden through wet woods, Or in the sunlight by the water Stand silent as a tree, this verse no longer weeps.The androgynous beauty of the poem’s addressee, who is initially pictured as a Wildean decadent (‘Give him a pale skin, a long hand,/A grey eye with deep eyelids, with ...”

“... of sustenance collapses. Food stocks run out. There are no wild grasses and berries left in the woods or on the mountain slopes. People have sold their last goats and chickens, their jewellery and even their cooking pots, usually for a pittance. The markets are empty; there’s no work to be had.This is what happened in Tigray and Wollo. The result, filmed ...”

“... a disgraceful young radical poet returning distractedly to his cottage after long scrambles in the woods. ‘He was the most interesting figure I ever saw,’ a child witness recalled later in life, still much struck. ‘His steps were often hurried, and sometimes he was rather fantastically arrayed … on his head would be a wreath of what in Marlow we call ...”

“... less dramatically situated than either Rievaulx or Fountains, on a flat and boggy plain backed by woods and always quite hard to find. A notable feature is an alleyway of reading carrels backing the cloister, together with many surviving stretches of medieval tiled floor, but much the most numinous object is a green earthenware inkwell found in the ...”

“... Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909). The frontispiece reproduces Peacock in the Woods, which Abbott Thayer painted to illustrate his theory that the male peacock’s plumage enabled it to disappear into a suitably sylvan background (‘the spread tail looks also very much like a shrub bearing some kind of fruit or flower’). Thayer applied ...”

“... of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods. In the same way, psychotic delusions keep up with scientific change: the people once pursued by phantasms of the dead are now pestered by living celebrities who watch them from inside their TV sets, and those who used to confess themselves possessed now ...”

“... simple, and astonishingly addictive. Towards the other extreme of sophistication on the BBC was Michael Jakobsen’s Citadel, in which you had to explore a large castle and its environs, picking up keys, unlocking doors, shooting large, malevolent monks between the eyes, taking chickens from the freezer and roasting them in the kitchen, boiling up bones in ...”

“... American Ambassadors to Japan – Thomas Foley, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael Armacost, the president of the Brookings Institution, and Walter Mondale, Carter’s Vice-President – wrote a joint letter to the Washington Post denouncing Congress for its willingness even to think about helping former American slave labourers get ...”

“... and said: ‘And this is the Bank of England. And do you sit here all day and never see the green woods and the trees and the flowers and the charming country? Are you contented with such a life?’ And all the time he nursed his little ...”