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“... it was terrific when the house-girl/with her earth-mother tits and come-on eyes –/no Snow Queen having cat-fits at a kiss –/brought me tarts and ham on a coloured plate’ (‘At the Green Cabaret’). The book is a green cabaret! Sometimes it is unforgivably coarse: in what it does to Rilke (‘The dark was heavier than Caesar’s foot’), to ...”

“... campaigners generating the stories. Early in his survey of ‘the new science of psychedelics’, Michael Pollan talks to Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), pioneers of therapeutic research into MDMA, LSD and ayahuasca, who is candid about his choice of the medical paradigm as ‘a means to a more ambitious and ...”

“... He was perhaps better known for his readymades – the bicycle wheel, the urinal, the snow shovel – than for his paintings. The most famous of his jokes about art was his drawing a moustache and a small goatee on a reproduction of La Gioconda, with the letters L.H.O.O.Q. printed by hand beneath. Pronounced in French, these letters sound like ...”

“... Jean Paul wrote. ‘He dresses with the most exquisite taste ... He is a volcano, outwardly snow-covered, inwardly full of molten matter ... At last not just the champagne but the conversation about art, the public etc made him blaze up and – we were with ...”

“... Pound. He groans when a critic remarks that you could track Bunting ‘everywhere in Pound’s snow’. But I think it’s a matter of the intention with which his name is brought up: Pound is not only and everywhere a menace, and in any case Bunting was never his creature. ‘I don’t want to minimise my debt to Ezra nor my admiration for his work, which ...”

“... least) with exile, sub-zero temperatures and days in the life of Soviet dissidents. A Siberian snow job, one might call it. The pastoral tones of Yevtushenko’s novel, pitched between the buffoonery of peasant comedy and full-blooded romantic lyricism, have not always translated well. Early in the narrative, there is a riverside meeting between a Siberian ...”

“... Edgar Snow, the famous American foreign correspondent, once asked Mao Tse-tung for his appraisal of the social implications of the French Revolution. Mao reflected a while and then, shaking his head, said: ‘I think it’s still a bit too early to tell.’ The late Chinese leader’s caution might seem excessive even to the most obsessive historians ...”

“... He sent this to the newly appointed Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday. Faraday replied immediately: Pickersgill’s report had ‘greatly excited’ his curiosity, not least because ‘the meteor or whatever else it might be’ had been witnessed by ‘men of philosophical & correct habits of observation’. Would ...”

“... megachurch pastors deliver their lucrative spiels on TV. Global warming means that Walden Pond is snow-free in December. Sleepy Hollow has a parking lot and resounds to the slamming of SUV doors. Yet Emerson found few truths more vivifying than the reflection that ‘the results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable.’ The only certainty was ...”

“... The result of increasing co2 is that more of the sun’s heat stays with us, melting our ice and snow (which reflect heat back into space). The added melt-water makes the seas rise, and, at an accelerating pace, we head back to the Carboniferous, whose long-buried carbon was causing us no harm until we started digging it up. (That the greenhouse effect is ...”

“... considerable personal fortune; teenage volunteers of the Walloon Legion dying in the Ukrainian snow in 1943; an accelerating exchange of assassinations and reprisals with the Resistance in 1944. But in Belgium, as elsewhere, collaboration with the Nazi occupiers was often, at least in the beginning, a more businesslike arrangement than popular legend ...”

“... convulsion of civil war. It had been snowing in the night, prematurely for the season; now the snow was thawing and the ground was muddy. The sun was yellow, honey-coloured, and her sidelong look seemed warmer in the sunshine.    ‘Will you marry me?’ I said.    ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I am tired of you.’    ‘I know ...”

“... Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the ...”

“... Jennings, who died two years ago, wrote too many poems. She was careless about her output, sending Michael Schmidt, her editor at Carcanet, ‘sacks’ of manuscript work to sift through and make into a collection. Even he seems occasionally to have lost track. His sympathetic and shrewd introduction records that her own favourite among her poems was ...”

“... become more rarified. Walking through London in the spring of 1938, with the sense of being on the snow line of a new ice age, depression overwhelms him like a black wave. ‘Whitehall is a gloomy street,’ he writes, ‘... and at night dead as the Acropolis, and my own past and the past of history came up like a darker cloud in the dark night, and I seemed ...”