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Where the Apples Come From

T.C. Smout: What Makes an Oak Tree Grow, 29 November 2007

Woodlands 
by Oliver Rackham.
Collins, 609 pp., £25, September 2006, 0 00 720243 1
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Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees 
by Richard Mabey.
Chatto, 289 pp., £20, October 2007, 978 1 85619 733 5
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Wildwood: A Journey through Trees 
by Roger Deakin.
Hamish Hamilton, 391 pp., £20, May 2007, 978 0 241 14184 7
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The Wild Trees: What if the Last Wilderness Is above Our Heads? 
by Richard Preston.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £20, August 2007, 978 1 84614 023 5
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... from the coppice stool after being pushed over by mammoths in the last interglacial? How do our woods, and the ways we have used them, compare with woods in other countries, for example in Japan? The largest and oldest wooden buildings in the world are in the complexes of ancient Japanese temples around Nara. Rackham is ...

Big Books

Adam Mars-Jones, 8 November 2018

... trim on the outside, feigning the sense of proportion that the contents had no time for. John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance was a proper doorstop, and so was L.H. Myers’s The Near and the Far, which I read in New Orleans in 1980, mainly in a hippyish French Quarter teahouse called Until Waiting Fills (a line from Robert Heinlein’s ...

War against the Grown-Ups

John Redmond, 21 August 1997

The Dumb House 
by John Burnside.
Cape, 198 pp., £9.99, May 1997, 0 224 04207 6
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A Normal Skin 
by John Burnside.
Cape, 61 pp., £7, May 1997, 0 224 04286 6
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... conscious of its literary co-ordinates, and this story falls squarely into the macabre area of John Burnside’s work. It is queerly echoed, for instance, by the conclusion of his prose-poem ‘Aphasia in Childhood’, which deals, in part, with exploring woods as a boy: ‘I was sure, if I dug a few inches deeper, I ...

Three Poems

John Burnside, 12 September 2019

... in a net I seek to hold the wind. Ode to Hypnos Here is the angel of slumber, come from the woods to press a bloody talon to the glass; the erstwhile abolitionist of mardi gras, pure stranger to himself, he fabricates this ersatz Eden, trading bishoprics of light for milk and honey, words in Aramaic, a Weihnachtsmarkt of diet pills and Lauds. Here is ...

Little Monstrosities

Hannah Rose Woods: Victorian Dogdom, 16 March 2023

Doggy People: The Victorians Who Made the Modern Dog 
by Michael Worboys.
Manchester, 312 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5261 6772 9
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... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...

Three Poems

John Ashbery, 19 February 2004

... no one to watch it, this sea breeze releases me to the cloud of knowing. There are beaters in the woods, nourishing it, and you’re it, reciting it. The long scramble upstairs landed us here. There is no method in the alphabet; the urchin came unseated. You have to learn to ‘bounce’ with the ages, just to keep up with time. By then it will have been ...

At Portobello

Susannah Clapp, 4 April 1985

Scotch Verdict 
by Lillian Faderman.
Quartet, 320 pp., £12.95, February 1985, 0 7043 2505 5
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... brought against her grandmother, Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, by the two schoolmistresses. Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie claimed that, acting on the word of her granddaughter, Dame Helen had brought about the ruin of their school and their reputations: she had withdrawn Jane Cumming from the school and caused the other pupils to be removed; she had not given ...

Two Poems

John Ashbery, 30 September 1999

... perhaps. Yet no mood will be shattered if we are diplomatic, for once. The inheritors of those woods and groves won’t oppress us, and there’ll be a chance for sleep and some grub. You’ll see. Lost Profile I had a voice once, braid falling over the front of my forehead-house and down the sides. No need for cream separators here someone said. My guide ...

Three Poems

John Burnside, 12 September 2013

... money); but now, for a season, they fly low over the fields and the thin paths that run to the woods at Gillingshill, the children calling out on Sunday walks to stop and look                      and all of us pausing to turn in our tracks while the mortgaged land falls silent for miles around, the village below us empty and grey as ...

‘Deer (not a play)’

Anne Carson: Jimi and the Deer, 15 November 2007

... SCENE: Sunday. England. Country road. CAST: deer Jimi Hendrix limo driver [Enter deer from woods on right. Stops, stands still on road] DEER: Heart is wild muscle Hum [Limo with JH in back approaches on road. JH on cell phone] JH: So. Dad. I’m in England. LD: Look we got a deer. JH: What? LD: There. JH: Just standing ...

Were we bullied?

Jamie Martin: Bretton Woods, 21 November 2013

The Battle of Bretton WoodsJohn Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order 
by Benn Steil.
Princeton, 449 pp., £19.95, February 2013, 978 0 691 14909 7
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... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...

Diary

Gillian Darley: John Evelyn and his gardens, 8 June 2006

... Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,’ John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge ...

Roaming the Greenwood

Colm Tóibín: A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods, 21 January 1999

A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition 
by Gregory Woods.
Yale, 448 pp., £24.95, February 1998, 0 300 07201 5
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... out as part of the pain of the earth’. In a chapter entitled ‘The Pink Triangle’, Gregory Woods writes: After the ‘liberation’ of the camps by the Allies, those survivors who wore the pink triangle – denoting that they had been imprisoned as homosexuals – were treated as common criminals who had deserved their in-carceration. Many were ...

An Essay Concerning Light

John Burnside, 20 March 2008

... Dying There are those who say we can choose, when the moment comes: a shape stealing home from the woods, a loping fox, or the smallest of birds, come in through an open window – firecrest, or wren – a flutter against the wall, or a ribbon of music; and, sometimes, a friend or a lover, twenty years on, the old hurts dissolved; ambivalence forgotten. Me, I ...

Disagreeable Glimpses

John Ashbery, 22 March 2001

... There were no boats, only trees and boathouses. It’s good to step off that steel carousel. The woods were made for musicianly echoes, though not all at once. Too many echoes are like no echo, or a single tall one. Please return dishes to main room after using. Try a little subtlety in self-defence; it’ll help, you’ll find out. The boards of the cottage ...

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