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Puccini spent a lot of time being told he was sentimental. To which he muttered in Italian: ‘Who gives a fuck?’

Argos has been waiting for his owner to come back from the Trojan wars. Twenty years and not a word. Once upon a time he and Odysseus had hunted together. But now his only function is to wait, lying on piles of dung, infested with fleas. And then suddenly Odysseus reappears, disguised in order to surprise Penelope’s suitors. Only Argos recognises him. In his excitement he drops his ears and wags his tail. Odysseus, however, dare not let the dog betray him. “Dashing a tear from his eyes”, he ignores Argos and walks on. Whereupon, in Homer’s words, “Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years.”

Howard Jacobson

We feed our crows peanuts, and our cat Black Bart used to play with the local crows. When Bart was killed by a coyote one early morning, it was the distress call of the crows that alerted us to what was left of his body. A week to the day after Bart died, we were awakened by a similar racket. When we went outside to see what the noise was about, there were about 40 crows in our yard, and below them, right on the spot where we found Bart’s body the week before, was the collar he had been wearing, complete with name tag.

Alison Alcoba

The whole world is, to me, very much “alive” – all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can’t look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life – the things going on – within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood.

Ansel Adams

The story goes that is’t 1583, Galileo is 19 years old, and he attends prayers here every day. But one visit, he gets distracted by something that most of us wouldn’t even notice – a swinging altar lamp. Highly musical and sensitive to tempo, he studies the rhythmic movement. Galileo then uses his pulse as a metronome to time the swing of the altar lamp […]

Steven Johnson

I keep a rhythm in my head.

James Robertson

I’ve got so to dislike lorries, that I bought a little book which tells me the names of them, and it’s the one way to get to like them, picking out these names and then looking for them. A Euclid, an Atkinson, a Seddon – endless different types with different names to them of an exciting kind. A Dumper Krupp.

John Betjeman

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.

Emma