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“... letters about its natural history published in 1788 by its devoted, life-long inhabitant, the Rev. Gilbert White. Editions of that classic have by now become legion. Just as all leading actors have to play Hamlet at some time in their career, so it almost seems that every well-known figure on the natural history scene is cajoled sooner or later into ...”

“... with the weather in other ways, though they borrow from the painter’s repertoire. In 1784 Gilbert White wrote of a freezing, clear December day that ‘the air was full of icy spiculae, floating in all directions, like atoms in a sun-beam let into a dark room.’ The Farnham diarist George Sturt recorded the end of a winter’s day in Victorian ...”

“... are well trodden. Barely a ‘nature book’ is published today without homage to J.A. Baker, or Gilbert White, or stern collectors like the 18th-century surgeon John Hunter, who dissected everything, including any hapless whale that wandered into the Thames. Much is fresh, though. When we reach New Zealand, the discussion turns to the relationship ...”

“... in which early scenes take place is the Woodhouse of The Lost Girl, and is based on Eastwood. Gilbert Noon’s father has a small business and some money, so does not share Lawrence’s family background. Like the gamekeeper Annable in The White Peacock, Noon has been to Cambridge and done well, but has chosen not to go ...”

“... who had never seen either. All records of passing time were precious to STW, from Proust to Gilbert White’s notes on his tortoise. ‘Continuity,’ she said, ‘it is that which we cannot write down, it is that which we cannot compass, record or control ... An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of ...”

“... no apparent connection to what has preceded them or comes after. Natural history writers such as Gilbert White are of particular importance to Harwood, whose territory ranges freely from cities and dream-like landscapes to the South Downs of Sussex and the mountains of North Wales, places often treated in a straightforward, naturalistic ...”

“... book: among other things, we pick up information about the Glandford Shell Museum, the Little Auk, Gilbert White, sea fishing, the Elephant Man, Edwardian Sheringham, Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, embroidery technique, Edward Meyerstein, Walt Disney, the Norfolk Giant, the pituitary gland, diabetes, MI5, and Einstein, who stayed at a (not ...”

“... for favours, careful to keep track when it was his turn to buy drinks (which he often did). Gilbert and George, by contrast, are utterly stylised: they speak in relays, move like robots and strongly hint that there is no within within. This book, left incomplete at the time of Farson’s death and tidied up by Robert Violette, is touching and ...”

“... Patience Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is not an end in itself but a way of opening up the world. And, indeed, they are all women: this is, at the highest level, a female form. It is unique to Saxon culture, to my ...”

“... she was passing in Harlem. The heroines of her novels are loners, alienated from both Black and white communities, but forced to masquerade as belonging to one or the other. In Quicksand (1928), Helga Crane, the daughter of a white working-class mother and a West Indian father, must pass as Black to enter Harlem ...”

“... of complicity in scientific racism and sexism for having asserted that inequalities between white and black and between men and women were the ineradicable outcome of nature rather than the insidious work of culture. A new book on avowedly Darwinian approaches to psychology, linguistics or literary theory can still ignite a bonfire of partisan reviews ...”

“... deformity (‘ruptured children’). Evelyn tells us this, and in The Natural History of Selborne Gilbert White repeats it, describing the procedure in detail: if the gash in the tree healed, so would the infant. White also talks about a ‘shrew ash’ in the parish, which was used to cure lameness in livestock. If a ...”

“... a thousand years (except in a few references to the Normans), but about four hundred. He credits Gilbert White, writing in the late 18th century, with being one of the first writers to praise the loveliness of trees. This won’t do. John Evelyn, a century before, had spoken of beeches making ‘spreading trees and noble shades with their ...”

“... published their monumental study of 19th-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert, poet and professor at the University of California at Davis, and Susan Gubar, professor at Indiana University, planned a sequel: a feminist history of women’s writing in the 20th century. At first, they expected to complete it in just a few years, but ...”

“... its foreleg as it hung to drain, ‘in the manner in which ladies of that day sometimes carried a white lacy shawl’. Thompson wrote quickly, and within a year of beginning the project sent 15 chapters to Oxford University Press. Lark Rise, the first volume, came out in 1939, followed by Over to Candleford in 1941 and Candleford Green in 1943. She wanted ...”