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“... to a gleaming keenness’ – and the right clothes for all occasions. ‘Today she wore a dark green suit and a Philip Treacy hat that was a minuscule square of black velvet topped with a few wisps of what might be spun sugar.’ ‘She was wearing the grey silk kimono that some Japanese bigwig presented to her when she visited Kyoto as a UN Special ...”

“... by nets, longlines and harpoons. The scale of the loss is mind-boggling. For every three hundred green turtles that swam the Caribbean before industrialised fishing, just one is left. Ninety per cent of the world’s large fish and oyster beds have gone. Seagrass meadows are disappearing at a rate of 7 per cent per year. Only one in twenty blue whales ...”

“... long as it did, liberals in Tel Aviv could tell themselves that things weren’t so bad behind the Green Line, the border between Israel and the territory it captured in the 1967 war. Indeed, the resilience of Israel’s democratic institutions helped sustain the illusion that the Green Line was still a frontier, even as it ...”

“... of his earlier joke about the horse that goes round and round the statue of King Billy on College Green. Apart from its obvious use as an image of political paralysis, the obsessive circular motion refers us back to Ferguson again, who wrote an essay ‘On the Ceremonial Turn, Called Desiul’. This is the Irish word deiseal, ‘clockwise’, which Joyce uses ...”

“... to Moscow’: The Emperor Nap he would set off On a summer excursion to Moscow; The fields were green, and the sky was blue, Morbleu! Parbleu! What a pleasant excursion to Moscow! It is hard to feel grim about the man who wrote this. As Storey rightly says, it cannot have been what his government patrons had in mind. Southey’s popular poetry was simply ...”

“... its place alongside Duchamp’s urinal, Picasso’s bicycle seat and the ‘broken pieces’ of a green bottle which shine with a light of their own in Williams’s ‘Between Walls’. Brown turns from the inexorable downward spiral of McTeague to the ‘underplotted sketches’ which comprise The Country of the Pointed Firs, an account of a summer spent in ...”

“... the shed’s concrete apron onto the grass. She doesn’t quite know what to make of the spongy green stuff. Is it safe to tread on?This is no ordinary zoo. In fact, it’s not a zoo at all. For one thing, there are no visitors, except on open days. For another, it houses members of a single species only. The sheds, enclosures, and an array of other ...”

“... would think Ukraine’s travails were worth this? The second is a relic from the past: even if a green industrial revolution does generate plenty of new jobs, most of them will be skilled, many of them will be short rather than long-term, and some will be automated. Labour can no longer do the heavy lifting required to anchor capitalist social ...”

“... in a shipping container, a post office, a satellite dish as big as the post office, the bright green tourism office with a sign showing the distance from Pohnpei to various cities around the world, and a billboard displaying two thermometers, which measured the island’s Covid vaccination progress (70 per cent of the population). At the Red Cross office I ...”

“... The​ day David died, I was in the Urbana Free Library, in the How to Organise section. I was always searching for ways to corral my home. Paper and books were my biggest downfall, but clothes didn’t stay on hangers and dishes multiplied. A lot of things multiplied. Especially books about how to organise your house ...”

“... too cleverly vivacious. The most valuable juxtaposition pairs two longish stories set in Scotland, David Craig’s ‘Jason and the Green Woman’ and John Murray’s ‘The Señor and the Celtic Cross’, which operate quite different ironies about the limits of civilised society. The latter story, told in a tormented ...”

“... the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County has John Wayne. Orange County, where unfettered individualism rises from a government-subsidised foundation in mineral wealth, agribusiness, aerospace and real-estate speculation. When John Wayne ...”

“... while the confessions said it had been left outside. Then there was an awkward doctor from Winson Green who kept insisting that the six defendants had sustained serious injuries before they were admitted to prison. He was sharply put down by Mr Justice Bridge. The injuries, the judge concluded, had probably been ‘self-inflicted’. ‘It is quite ...”

“... West who have no visceral understanding of the risks posed by infectious illness. In addition, as David Runciman has pointed out, politicians and government don’t get credit for the disasters and failures they prevent. The combination of these two factors – generational obliviousness and the bias away from the good governance of prevention – goes a long ...”

“... An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan. Reg was nicely cased in a blue three-piece by Woods of Kingsland Road. Dickie matched him. (The Twins were very influential that way. All the faces were expected to dress to a ...”