“... There is something interesting to be said for everything around us,’ Charles Schulz’s Linus says in a Peanuts-derived commercial for Weber’s bread, first broadcast in the late 1960s. But there’s interesting and there’s interesting: sometimes you just get lost. The first work I saw by the British artist Helen Marten, about eight years ago, was a sculpture resembling a makeshift desk or lectern, on and around which were strewn various baked goods, a sheet of beaten copper and a pile of pizzeria flyers showing Gerhard Richter’s 1988 painting Betty ...”

“... above the baby sleeping on your knee or the song you never heard; ‘The Danger Zone’ that Ray Charles sang throughout the Cuban missile crisis? And does she think the knee she lies on is the bell of a sack but or a crumhorn and the air is turning in a harmony? Another body is hoisted under the sun onto the catafalque of a cargo container amongst other ...”

“... in Skin Tight, a tree surgeon puts a mistake made by his brother (a plastic surgeon) through a wood-chipping machine, the minced flesh raises no more than a passing yuck, while in Native Tongue the torn limb of a red mangrove, trashed to make way for a golf course, wins a genuine tear. Hiaasen writes to a formula with brilliant success. His books are ...”

“... trail of connotations. A bigger block, this time of rough-hewn oak rather than fine-grained local wood, depicts the artist Meijer de Haan as an august spirit of the woods; but in the canvas Barbarian Tales (1902) de Haan’s physiognomy is given to a pink-skinned, demonic intruder ogling two beauties in a tropical glade.Gauguin liked to keep the essence of ...”

“... Gwen Darwin in Cambridge (in a house that is now Darwin College) in 1885, the granddaughter of Charles. The Darwins were a vast dynasty: seven of Charles’s ten children survived to adulthood and between them produced ten grandchildren and almost thirty great-grandchildren. The sons understandably found their father’s ...”

“... Marsh, Victoria to the elite Geelong Grammar School (after Rupert Murdoch and before Prince Charles, as he likes to say). Another long-term concern has been what he sees as the tortured relationship between Australia and its English-speaking relations: one of his first short stories, ‘American Dreams’, is about a small Australian town and its dreams ...”

“... on Coleman Street in the late 1590s (and who was therefore a neighbour of the mercer Henry Wood, a business associate of the Mountjoys and a rather overheated admirer of Mountjoy’s sparky wife, Marie). This Tripier was married at the French Church in January 1601, but Abraham cannot be a son of this marriage: the presence of a 12-year-old in that ...”

“... and perfumed flavour is one of the characteristic tastes of South India. Anjilly is still the wood of choice for the boat builders of Kerala – the shipyards which turned out large seafaring ships are now few, but the traditional skills are still deployed building the wonderful ‘snake boats’ which race on the rivers with crews of a hundred ...”

“... thirteen metres) into the warren. Part of the balcony had collapsed: one could see splintered wood, though the gap looked small for the bulky Count to have fallen through. Ladders were fetched. Three or four of the men climbed down the ‘wilderness wall’ and into the warren. They confirmed that Cenci was dead – despite his fall having been broken by ...”

“... The double-bottomed ship was from the start intended to be a public-private partnership: Charles II initially gave it vocal support but no money; Petty ventured some of his own funds; Viscount Massereene, a big Irish landowner, put in some more. The Royal Society, which was itself still hoping for Crown subvention, appointed an elite ...”

“... were threaded. I remember the sensation of sandpaper, the heat of it after it was rubbed on wood and its roughness when I held it to my face.When he finished the model, my father took it to Rabbies, a restaurant he co-owned on Burns Statue Square in Ayr, which served steak with tomatoes cut into Little Red Riding Hood baskets. A copy of the Selkirk ...”

“... English chronicle play look obsolete (goodbye Richards and Henrys, hello Lear and Cymbeline). For Charles Nicholl, however, another simultaneously personal and geopolitical factor has a bearing on the timing of King Lear: Shakespeare’s long-standing interest in France. The country whose king Cordelia marries and whose army she deploys in her attempt to ...”

“... leaf eaters, photographers, practitioners of shinrin-yoku, land-sat interpreters, climatologists, wood butchers, picnickers, foresters, ring counters and the rest of us.’ ‘Wood butchers’, a dismissive term for incompetent carpenters, seems an odd inclusion – why should carpenters be so disparaged when loggers and ...”

“... without remembering that all the work in this particular show was purchased or commissioned by Charles Saatchi. No doubt he will be pleased to be compared with Isabella d’Este. If there is a serious theme running through these essays, it concerns the nature of the ‘modern’ and the ‘new’ as governing principles of 20th-century art. The underlying ...”

“... 18th. In Constable’s picture firelight from a Gypsy encampment reddens the tree trunks in the wood to the right of the canvas. It is a miniature scene within a scene conceived with a knowledge of Wright of Derby’s popular night pieces, The Blacksmiths’ Shops and An Iron Forge. The scenic possibilities of industrialisation, the blazing furnaces and ...”