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“... vestige of reticence or shame) was the petit mal, dread of whose grand sequel blighted his life. Michael Thorn opens with a deferential salutation to ‘Professor Martin’s magisterial biography’. This is, however, decoy fire. What follows is a prolonged undermining of The Unquiet Heart (often without naming the author or his book). ...”

“... he seems to feel that nothing less than the whole life of his hero, the alcoholic wanderer Michael Thorn, will do, and nothing less than the full monty of a novel. This is a great pity, generally, where modern British writing is concerned, and, specifically, for Rolling, which for the first fifty pages (a love affair with a schoolboy in ...”

“... as the throbbing duet of the pigeons in their bay on the roof, as the hours he spent trapped in a thorn-bush, inhaling a local ...”

“... This German novel has waited nearly forty years for its English translator. Michael Hofmann fell in love the moment the Good Fairy told him about it, and set out to liberate it from the thorn hedge of neglect. The Good Fairy, in this case, was a Berlin bookseller ‘who First recommended Koeppen ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... planning centre until its grant was cut by a council no longer prepared to go on funding a thorn in its side. Nothing is resented more bitterly amongst the traditionalist old guard of Bermondsey than the fact that the new oppositionists were ‘outsiders’ and even in some cases actually ‘middle-class’. This mattered far more than the fact that ...”

“... as recurrent in the rural-descriptive writing as in the fiction, while stories such as ‘An Old Thorn’ and the startling ‘El Ombu’ are entirely founded on this motif. The idea makes an especially interesting appearance at the end of Far Away and Long Ago. When he was 16, Hudson tells us, he was warned by the doctors that he might die at any moment ...”

“... merely be hung on their branches: ‘ciascuno al prun dell’ombra sua molesta’ (each on the thorn of its own molesting shade). The extra emblematic meaning of this line is not difficult to spell out – someone so self-hating as to kill himself can be imagined as having already spent his life ‘on the thorn of his ...”

“... on for advice, and when he arrived at the grotto he received a visitation from the Archangel Michael, who ordered him to consecrate a Christian altar on the site. It’s not known what happened to the man with the arrow in his forehead, but the result of his misadventure was the famous Santuario di San Michele. In 999 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto ...”

“... Basil Bunting, and who else? In a tight spot Wall-ace Stevens appealed to the famous line from ‘Michael’, ‘And never lifted up a single stone’ (drawing from it unwarrantable inferences, as Robinson points out): but Stevens’s admirers know they are on safer ground if they appeal to Coleridge or Keats, Blake Or Emerson. It takes some nerve, in ...”

“... long, and covered with loose pieces of pumice about as big as a man’s head. A sort of pale grey thorn scrub, and a few camels eating it. A sort of green shrub, much rarer, and a goat or two eating that. A second daughter, Roudaba, was born on Tenerife in 1934, but mostly Bunting was pretty wretched. He wrote to Pound that ‘the people of this island ...”

“... and more lethally competent at politics. Theodoric the Amal had since the early 470s been a thorn in the side of the Eastern emperors at whose court he was educated. Though he helped Zeno as much as he harmed him, by 488 the emperor had had enough. He offered the governance of Italy to Theodoric and his followers (whom we may for convenience call the ...”

“... of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the North, the two languages, the available rhetorics. I have been reading The Crane Bag in association with Hugh Kenner’s new book, A ...”

“... thorny thickets where animals could not get at them. Once they had grown up and overtopped the thorn they created an oak grove. They did not reproduce beneath themselves, but grew up in new thickets in the savannah, to which their acorns had been carried by jays. Eventually, a grove would collapse from old age, grazing beasts would get in as it became ...”

“... writes of turning ‘Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,/Into my honest roadside prose –/All thorn, but cousin to your rose.’ When Nabokov’s version of the poem came out in 1964, it was prose laid out in stanza form, and more woody stalk than thorn. Readers of the poem in English are best advised to have the two ...”