“... the nearness of the child to the surface of the adult. Pat Doyne-Ditmas was the daughter of Joan Thomas, who played cricket for England:‘I was amazed by how hopeless the Cheltenham girls were at batting when I arrived,’ said Pat, ‘tossing the ball about.’ Aged 82 and looking not a day over 60, she stood up in my kitchen and imitated a Cheltenham girl ...”

“... if she wanted, altered or fabricated, as in her account of finding a ‘Sacred Baboon’ on the beach at the age of two. There is nothing unusual about the alteration or fabrication of events: what is unusual is the degree to which she used them as vital elements in her psychodrama. Anne Stevenson deftly begins her first chapter with such a ...”

“... train or ship. If there was something of Baudelaire about Larbaud, there was also a touch of Terry-Thomas. Larbaud’s best-known work is probably the novel Fermina Marquez, about a Colombian beauty who sows sentimental-erotic havoc among the students at a boys’ boarding school – the missing link, one might say, between The Red and the Black and The ...”

“... grandmother remembers white horses bursting out of the sea onto the sand, ‘rearing up onto the beach, a dozen horses, two dozen horses running in front of me and splashing drops of salty water on my face while two score more horses came out of the sea, running in front of me and running behind me’. This vision was not a dream: a cargo boat carrying ...”

“... seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is ...”

“... And why is it that the members of the German Youth movement contorting their bodies on the beach are ‘mostly middle-aged’? His dreams of the political transformation which might be brought about beneath ‘the athletic sun’ begin to fade when he discovers, on his return to Hamburg in 1932, that Heinrich with his long fair hair was probably never ...”

“... was the question James Cook liked most of all. When he stood for the first time on the black sand beach of Matavai in Tahiti, he calculated he was 17°29'15"S and 149°30'38"W. It would have given him great satisfaction to have known that he was out in longitude by only 24 seconds by modern satellite navigation. On this first voyage he did not have the ...”

“... to face the worst. If we read further we find that Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Melville, Thomas Hardy and the author of Ecclesiastes are also members. Edmund Blunden thought The City of Dreadful Night a great anticipation of The Waste Land. If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter ...”

“... variation.’ Segal spent three years first as a postdoctoral fellow under the study’s director, Thomas Bouchard, and then as the assistant director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. Her book answers critics of Mistra who argue, as Joseph Jay did in the American Journal of Psychology in 2001, that ‘the studies of separated twins ...”

“... and shunted from school to school as Charlie moved restlessly between his houses in New York, Palm Beach, North Carolina, Southampton and Tucson. In 1933, when Merrill was seven, his parents hired as his governess a woman named Lilla Howard whom Jimmy came to love. She seemed to have exotic European origins and, though not French, was to be addressed as ...”

“... marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo somewhere in my head, two lines from The Pleasures of Hope. ‘Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure hue. Not good lines, but they seemed good enough as I ...”

“... this means luring the codswallopers back to a warmer, sunnier Whitby, even if most of the beach will have disappeared under the North Sea). Now there’s a reason to look on the bright side. There are more detailed ideas in the Environment Agency’s action plan for the Thames Estuary. The ‘assets and people at risk in the tidal Thames ...”

“... childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem scarcely less bizarre and exotic. We no longer think of ...”

“... New York but Minneapolis, where the behaviourist B.F. Skinner worked, and where, since 1969, Thomas Bouchard has taught a course on the ‘measurement’ of individual personalities and twins. ‘Not every university offers such a course,’ Bouchard has remarked, ‘in part because race, gender and class differences are closely compared, which arouses ...”

“... gyres. It likes Wendy Cope and Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Thomas Hardy and the lullabies of Housman. It prefers poets whose speakers say how they feel, and feel what they say, while never running out of rhythm and never speaking in tongues. It likes Philip Larkin, the unlikely patron saint of self-help, though it’s ...”