“... were resettled in a ‘model’ village along with their forebears’ gravestones. By contrast Robert Macfarlane’s accounts are nothing if not first-hand. He is a literary scholar who has spent many hundreds of hours walking in England and the Scottish Highlands, in Spain, Palestine and Tibet. His aim here is to describe some of his most memorable ...”

“... always dresses up in her best clothes. Their sex life, such as it ever was, is faltering badly. Robert, their 18-year-old son (Charlie is in his late forties, Maureen ten years younger), is unemployed, and Charlie disapproves of him, calls him a ‘layabout’. It breaks his mother’s heart when he leaves home and moves into a squat. Charlie has a younger ...”

“... years’. In Newsweek, Walter Shapiro found it ‘the best aide’s-eye view of politics since Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men’. In the New Republic, Matthew Cooper, after revealing (‘full disclosure’) that he himself is now dating Mandy Grunwald, who held the position in the Clinton campaign of the novel’s sexy heroine Daisy ...”

“... some living artists. The title of the current exhibition, The Shock of the Old (an allusion to Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New, about the rise of modern art since Impressionism), is playfully intended to convey the provocation of exhibiting such paintings among the contemporary work on view nearby, at edgier dealers like Pace and Marlborough ...”

“... It’s a serious book festival in a small town in Galloway, with a large screen on the village green, marquees in the school playground and a pop-up bar in the local garage. Our stand was beside people selling honey and pottery, and since we were only selling the chance to be part of our research there wasn’t much interest at first. I tried to get some ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... opened the way for that celebrated trio of the late 19th century, Crane, Caldecott and Kate Green-away – vigorous, sportive and quaint respectively. Whalley and Chester note the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements on these and other styles of illustration, and show how Caldecott, in particular, affected later water-colourists like ...”

“... wonder where they get the time.In the spring of 1988, I had an Amstrad 8512 with a slow-blinking green cursor that slowed to a stop on larger files. I was finishing a book of short stories and I remember reading Morrison’s early novels as a kind of bliss. Now, I am afraid to open them in case their brilliance no longer holds, in case I am too restless and ...”

“... All the Fays. There is concern at the Palace. Even the Cabinet war-council is cruising for some green relief, some planetary crisis to get them off the hook. Publishers have only to bring into focus all this universal, non-specific weather angst, then to feed it, fan it, explain it away. The resultant, glossy anthologies of climatic irregularities – acid ...”

“... The Allotment’ returns from war to find that he must choose between ‘an England, profitlessly green’ and a landscape where           slag in lavafolds rolls beneath him. The first part of the poem seems to be spoken to the man in his allotment, but, immediately after remarking on a bitterness ‘rooted in your silence’, the second-person ...”

“... I glanced out of the window at the suburban sprawl scattered like so much confetti over the gnarly green terrain. In the distance, the tall white cluster of buildings that formed downtown Los Angeles poked through a corona of smog. Coming into view below was my destination: the 480-acre subdivision established in 1887 and named ‘Hollywood’ by a real estate ...”

“... he could not believe his tear-filled eyes. Firstly that it was so small, secondly that it was so green, thirdly that its gentleness was so brilliantly meek in the burning sun. It looked like a skylark, like a little lark turned into an island. The green was turquoise green, the colour of ...”

“... Lubies d’ Arthur but similarly imagined, Des aveugles is about a young blind couple, Josette and Robert, who live in an institution for the blind. When another blind man, Taillegeur, falls in love with Josette, he sets up an elaborate series of obstacles designed to kill Robert, but ...”

“... So irregular, appealing and – if one may say – so pitiable a figure is the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) that he comfortably resists summary description. Even his biographer, Robert Mächler, begins by warning himself, via a feisty sentence of his subject’s: ‘No one is entitled to behave towards me as if they knew me ...”

“... the experience in one of the styles patented by Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Robert Byron. The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have a sufficiently ...”