“... Later, he is reproached by his old friend, the literary translator and scholar of Tokyo, Edward Seidensticker: ‘You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.’ He replies that Seidensticker ‘really hated himself, not these people, and that he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing’. As ...”

“... and wake your father.’ My mother. When we say life we often mean risk. 12 April, Yorkshire. Snow in the night, which covers the lawn and clinging to the half-opened leaves makes the trees bulky and seemingly as laden with blossom as in a Samuel Palmer. In the afternoon we go over to Austwick and walk down the muddy lane to the clapper bridge. There are ...”

“... beyond reach). There were no ski-lifts, so they had to walk up through the tree line where the snow was less deep, carrying their clunky wooden skis and poles. They worked on ploughing and carving, sharp Christies, controlled avoidance, until Donald was ready to be unleashed, speeding down the course at the edge of the forest, arriving at the bottom ...”

“... it is not) an official biography, he has evidently depended on or even worked fairly closely with Edward Mendelson, perhaps Auden’s ‘scholar-in-chief’, his literary executor and the editor who worked directly according to his wishes. And yet legends afflict Mendelson’s work as well. After his edition of the Collected Poems, which retains Auden’s own ...”

“... would have blown itself apart before any appreciable thermonuclear processes were initiated. Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, émigré scientists from Hungary and Poland respectively, who were working at Los Alamos, found an ingenious solution in 1951. As part of his work on improved fission weapons Ulam had suggested a two-stage fission design. Teller ...”

“... greatly encouraged from having seen last night a rough assembly of what has been shot so far, the snow scenes at Thame looking particularly good with no hint that these were filmed on the hottest day of the year. Nor had I anticipated the change-over to much more muted colours as the King’s madness takes hold, Kew (Thame Park) almost in black and white with ...”

“... important, of biomass over biodiversity, environmentalism over ecology proper. Apologists for what Edward O. Wilson has termed ‘the prosthetic environment’ picture nature as a controllable steady gate – a model which lends itself to idioms drawn from good housekeeping (knowing what is in the global larder) and good living (the environment as ...”

“... particularly the more mystical ones, such as the earthworks at Barbary Castle or Stonehenge in the snow. These are pictures from the landscape of the Romantic imagination, far from the reality of motorways, out-of-town superstores and ‘Logistics’ warehouses.The film gives a fascinating glimpse of Brandt in the year he died: a slender, elegant man with ...”

“... abandoned the requirement that Friends observe ‘plainness of speech, behaviour and apparel’. Edward Fry accepted the previously unthinkable worldly honour of a knighthood. George Cadbury moved into a mansion with thirty servants. In the 1930s, when Rowntree scandalised the Cadburys and the Frys by trying to patent industrial processes – some Victorian ...”

“... to become a barrister but spent most of his time with literary friends, including the critic Edward Dowden and the poet John Todhunter. John and Susan named their first child William Butler Yeats. Soon afterwards they had a daughter, Lily. As a law student, John Butler Yeats had begun drawing – and his talent at it, as well as the influence of his ...”

“... to tell you three times in as many stanzas that he is, like old Lear, ‘mad as the mist and snow’. Yeats felt enabled by hatred because it both makes the speaker more insistently present to himself and more not himself, more not having a point of view. For the hate-speaker, Riley notes, ‘the language of anger is so dictatorial that it won’t allow ...”

“... was already there. But when it came to the Underground, London did reach out, to the countryside. Edward Watkin, who became chairman of the Metropolitan in 1872, drove the Underground overground for 35 miles, to Aylesbury, in order to further his ambition to build mainline railways linking England and France through a Channel tunnel. He failed in that, but ...”

“... in the stunning set-piece that pulls the white whale forward from first sighting (‘a hump like a snow-hill’) into a recognisable shape ‘far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters’; then, the whale appears in front of Ishmael: ‘the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade . . . A gentle ...”

“... we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to snow and as we drive through this landscape of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more foggy and like a journey out of Le Grand Meaulnes. It’s all of an hour before we reach the church and everyone has gone in, the undertakers with a ...”