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“... Story of a Man last time a man was sealed in skin like an inspoken word sealed in it was mid-spring, most people arm in arm, most trees whispering and he could just make out the fluttering light it was warm, it was days you walk out without a coat and little rain showers dash across the carpark and he stood there, like a man on film, going on with his heartwork at last at last he could think clearly this is myself, he said, rubbing round all four sides of my breeze-block patience this is one or two flying strands of my eyes this is my heart’s halo’s prismatic subdivisions there were people bringing chairs to the fire-escapes, peering down ...”

“... is followed by another twenty seconds of silence ‘and starts and starts’. This allows Oswald to do what she has always wanted to do, which is to represent being in time, where things recur and repeat, and in which attempts to pause and linger on the moment get thwarted by the necessary flow of time. But it also forces her not to get stuck, since ...”

“... Alice Oswald, though she may not seem it at first, is an opinionated poet of ideas, and her poetry is ambitious in both form and scope. She writes taut poems about nature but refuses to call them ‘nature poems’. Her work is ‘full of hymns’, as Elizabeth Bishop said of her own, as well as pagan shouts and birdcalls ...”

“... trope’s darker side in her translations of epic similes from the Iliad and the Odyssey. While Alice Oswald in her sombre Memorial isolated Homer’s similes as lyric respites from the general slaughter, Stallings finds them underscoring the horror, as in Odyssey 22.468-473, the passage where Telemachus hangs in one noose the maidservants who slept ...”

“... years, female writers and translators from Greek and Latin have come to increased prominence: Alice Oswald, Emily Wilson and Natalie Haynes have been among those offering new perspectives on Homer. Shadi Bartsch explicitly places her translation of Virgil in the context of her own peripatetic childhood and her subsequent experience building a career ...”

“... and light’. In Memorial (2011), her anti-heroic, radically pared-back version of the Iliad, Alice Oswald renders it as ‘bright unbearable reality’. While Wilson’s version has moments of throwaway beauty – Poseidon is ‘the god who wraps around the world’ – her goal, she says, was ‘immediacy’:The wife of Hector so far still knew ...”

“... for her retelling of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, is ‘transadaptation’. More eloquently, Alice Oswald subtitled her book-length elegy, Memorial, which revisits the Iliad, an ‘excavation’. There are other words, too: Jeanette Winterson has borrowed ‘cover’ from the music industry for her retelling of The Winter’s Tale. In earlier ...”

“... General Strike. It’s Bunter’s tailor who runs up some subsequently notorious black shirts for Oswald Mosley and his followers. Churchill assumes power in 1940 at the behest of Bunter. Bunter is at the bottom of the Suez business. ‘The Waste Land’ is a patch of ground at the back of the Bunter residence. David Hughes even devises a comic ...”

“... honours the dead on both sides in the Trojan War and he gives us more than two hundred names – Alice Oswald opens her fine ‘excavation’ of the Iliad, which is explicitly called Memorial, by listing them. But this list, horribly long as it is, does not remember all who died at Troy. The roll call of the fallen doesn’t include women, for a ...”

“... the nickname given to the narrator of Gabriel’s Lament by his stupid father, Oswald Harvey, who brings Gabriel a rubber sheet to sleep on, because ‘the stench in here,’ says Oswald, ‘is offending my nostrils.’ Later on, Oswald comes into Gabriel’s bedroom at ...”

“... child was still-born; the love affair lasted for the rest of Bland’s life. The ‘nurse’ was Alice Hoatson, who four years earlier had accepted one of Nesbit’s short stories for publication in Sylvia’s Home Journal. Called ‘Mouse’ by the Blands, and known as ‘Uncle Harry’ to the readers of her poems for children, Hoatson underweeningly ...”

“... teeming and steady, just as I like it’.In her introduction​ to Travels in the Americas, Alice Kaplan writes that, thanks to the dispatches of Sartre and other French writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North ...”

“... mooted long ago by R.B. McKerrow, but he produced only the Prolegomena (1939) before he died, and Alice Walker, who took over the project, did not issue a single play. With this discouraging history behind him, Professor Wells seems not to have been thinking of old spelling when he mounted the present assault on the Shakespearian summit. ‘The newly proposed ...”

“... reassured that it was only ‘Mr Gisbourne’s bonfire’. An hour later, the theatre manageress, Alice Rainbow, was finally warned that the building was on fire. She ran through the theatre opening all the doors and windows in the misguided hope that this would curb it. By early afternoon, as Sally Beauman records in her history of the Royal Shakespeare ...”