Hints and tips:
...Worse, the Edward Heath government’s latest effort to hold down pay increases had provoked fresh unrest from the trade unions....
...“What you lose in perfection from them, you gain in birdsong and a more lively garden,” he says. Nature doesn’t conform to human ideals, says Tom Massey....
...It is as if, like in Edward Thomas’s 1917 poem “Adlestrop”, the train has pulled up to a quiet, rural station where “no one left and no one came” and only a blackbird sang....
...pyjamas as soon as I’m out of bed, cup of tea in one hand, desperate to check on the roses; a pre-supper gin on folding chairs among the nasturtiums and sweet peas, the sound of clinking ice cubes and birdsong...
...Maybe, by then, so many of us would have become accustomed to the brilliant stars, to the comfort of birdsong, to a stiller life, that we would fight for it....
...Karine Polwart’s album is alive with birdsong of all sorts, grouse, plover and curlew, and with references to larks and gannets, but its central image is pink-footed geese migrating past Fala Flow, in Fife...
...His groundbreaking 2004 book on immigration to Britain, Bloody Foreigners, has a harrowing centrepiece, Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews....
...Kellett describes buyers standing in gardens, straining to hear the whine of traffic above the birdsong. “Londoners are the worst for it,” she says....
...A trek down to the outskirts of the nearest town deepens the mystery — no traffic, no people, not even any birdsong, and the sky white and featureless....
...The storm lasted an hour and cleared to brightness as we drove south through birdsong and smells of petrichor, the mineral scent of rain on dry earth....
...His finest pictures are as far beyond simple recordings of fact as Messiaen’s music is beyond recording of birdsong....
...In Cody’s hands this quirky cocktail of haunting bell-like sonorities, thumping jazz and even some elements of birdsong sounded mesmerising. parklanegroup.co.uk...
...If you trace the tradition back via Ronald Blythe, Kenneth Allsop, JHB Peel, TH White and others, you’ll find John Stewart Collis, Edward Thomas’s prose, Richard Jefferies and, of course, Gilbert White and...
...Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas, by Matthew Hollis, Faber, RRP£20, 389 pages...
International Edition