“... no less true than the Cross.Poems of primary colours, and the liturgical and heraldic colours, green, gold, purple, yellow, black and red, illuminated by bright shafts under ‘the soiled grey blanket of Irish rain’. (The Bayeux tapestry is not the appropriate visual image for Muldoon: we should think rather of the Book of Kells.) On the other ...”

“... his stories by Harper’s. Three of his novels were filmed (one by a remarkable artist, Peter Ustinov). His plays were produced in the West End, by Tyrone Guthrie, Ustinov, Gielgud. He won medals for two of his children’s books, and the War Office commissioned books from him, as did Drambuie and Rio Tinto Zinc. His works were finally issued by ...”

“... Technologies, the big data firm set up by the PayPal co-founder and Republican Party funder Peter Thiel, and Faculty, a small artificial intelligence company previously employed by Cummings’s Vote Leave campaign.During the summer, I was surprised to stumble across the name Public First in a spreadsheet of Cabinet Office spending data. Public First is ...”

“... gay couple (or artistic couple of any sexual stripe), as celebrated as the earlier musical duo Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, though they rigorously resist all efforts by the gay community to assimilate them. When Farson asked them for details of their sex life, George became vehement: ‘That’s part of a different story. Not part of the G–G ...”

“... met, Jack Edge,’ Binding drifts dangerously close to the mythical bucolic never-never land of Peter Ackroyd’s English Music. He shares with Ackroyd a love of music-hall, or its wilder sibling, the Punch and Judy show. On one level, that is what A Perfect Execution is. An exhibition in a tent or a glass box at the end of the pier. Pantomime horror, like ...”

“... to intrude in a way that doesn’t always quite work. There’s a politician in Slow Horses called Peter Judd who’s clearly modelled on Boris Johnson (‘fluffy-haired’ etc) and crops up in several of the later novels, so it’s jarring when ‘Boris bikes’ get a mention in Real Tigers (though they could hardly be ‘...”

“... Ironically, working on a monumental scale involved a loss. In his short, ardent, posthumous book Peter Fuller concedes that there was some unevenness in Moore’s sculpture, but he has no time for the ‘waves of intellectuals’ who have expressed serious reservations in recent decades. Moore is presented as an embodiment of ancient sagacity, a lonely ...”

“... with all its sins and guile and blandishments was beckoning.’ ‘Gallivanting’ was beckoning. Peter Abelard, as she calls a lay admirer, an inaugural married man, landed her in one of love’s many fiascos. She went off to Dublin, where she apprenticed herself to a pharmacist and to the literary community, where more denigrators were awaiting her, honing ...”

“... especially. Reflections on the Nile and Summer Palaces are the latest books by Ronald Bottrall and Peter Scupham. Their titles and covers provide a fair clue to the stances of the respective poets. The cover of Bottrall’s book is a strip of limo-green over dirty yellow – the sky over Egypt, you think, the muddy ...”

“... wake of 1816, the ‘year without a summer’, wasn’t just the spectre of a non-redemptive, St Peter-less and faith-free apocalypse, but the question of what kind of meaning life has in a future with nobody in it. Today’s narratives of climate change and pandemic – which have themselves displaced previous generations’ anxieties about the Bomb – are ...”

“... wish to remove their more flagrant tattoos, Nabokov did not want Lolita to remain for ever in the green livery of the Olympia Press. At some point in most reading you must stop noticing the printed page if you are to attend fully to the words on it. The thing about most private press books was not that they were read differently, but that they were not read ...”

“... he was easy-going and funny. He could also be boring even then. He was inclined to go on about the Green Committee, to which he had been official secretary in his Civil Service days. This had had something to do with fixing miners’ wages during the war, and had given him a tediously detailed knowledge of the coal industry. Another favourite was his ...”

“... The agricultural revolutions in which wheat replaced sheep, or the yellow of rape-seed the green of beet-tops, can leave scars on the sensitive psyche: they cannot be said, in any literal sense, to be the end of the world. But there are those who argue that the disappearance of marginal habitats – the marshes and heaths which are drained and ...”

“... figure.’ The next day he settles on a shepherd plaid shawl (rather than on the large blue and green plaid in the sketch) for the woman. On the 24th he spends two hours dressing up the lay figure of the man, and on the 30th he is working on the ‘coat of the Emigrant from the one I made on purpose two winters ago at Hampstead & have [never] worn since ...”

“... showed when they went on to campaign against the planned construction of a reservoir at Cow Green in Teesdale. There are those who get as much pleasure from reading a hedgerow as from reading a book, and for whom making lists is an end in itself. The health of a society like the BSBI, however, depends on having useful work in hand. Conflicts in the ...”