“... left after a tooth extraction. The Chinese Embassy in New Belgrade, with its pagoda-like roof of green ceramic tiles, at first appears untouched, but round the corner a whole slice of the building is missing, revealing a cross-section like an architect’s model. In the old town, rebuilding has begun. The shattered windows of the Orthodox Patriarchate have ...”

“... inspiration. By the early 1950s, when Young started the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green and did a series of studies from there with Peter Willmott and others, there was simply no adequate information on what most people might want from politics. This research – done, it is true, in the South-East, away ...”

“... use of that fable in his second volume inevitably attaches a disabling reminder of the Dunciad to Peter Robinson and his assembled chorus of scholars. There is something cosy and desperate in their yawping enterprise. It could be that Ricks, in his essay ‘Tenebrae and At-One-Ment’, is deliberately baiting ‘the current scientism and theoreticity’, but ...”

“... Loyalist operator gave the impression that he looked forward to putting down his gun. When I asked Peter Robinson of the DUP about his, he replied: ‘If I got the chance to get it out, I’d probably get quite close to my target.’ We were gazing across Robinson’s lawn at the ramparts of his garden wall. His closed circuit TV was showing a dull ...”

“... and discourse about the way society treats the ‘erring outcast’ (Christopher Matthew and Benny Green identify her as a Gaiety Girl drowned the previous year at Goring: ‘Jerome read a report of the tragedy in the Berkshire Chronicle and decided to incorporate it into his story’). Jerome’s most successful serious play, though few would now grant it the ...”

“... any national political fight was calling itself a revolution. The Rose Revolution (Georgia), the Green Revolution (Iran), the Tulip Revolution (Kyrgyzstan), the Jeans Revolution (Belarus), the Cedar Revolution (Lebanon), the Jasmine Revolution (Tunisia). Some of these were revolutionary, others not at all. ‘Revolution’ stopped being the name you gave to ...”

“... character called Greenbo Jenkins: part saint, part thug, part corporate slave, who refers to Liam Green in the third person. I stayed at his flat in a boxy suburb. ‘Why Munich?’ I asked. His parents had moved on, as expats do: there was no family to tie him here. ‘Because the streets seemed the most familiar,’ he said. For all the free movement ...”

“... the state. Those writers who were influenced by Continental ideas – Coleridge, Carlyle or T.H. Green – remained on the margin, at least when it came to politics. Britons gloried in the non-doctrinal nature of their politics. ‘Britain is not governed by logic,’ Disraeli proclaimed, ‘she is governed by parliament.’ And Balfour, no stranger to the ...”

“... denial, with the backing of ExxonMobil and others. Framed by a giant Union Jack and a lurid, green-tinged backdrop of clouds and bright skies, Heartland’s president, James Taylor, declared climate change ‘a Trojan horse for socialism and communism’. Lois Perry, who runs Heartland’s UK operation, went further. Carbon dioxide, she claimed, is ...”

“... on economic theory in Cambridge. In the post-war years there was an opportunity for a move to a green-field site at Croydon. But however cramped the conditions in Houghton Street, even after Beveridge’s concrete-mixers had provided new classrooms (and bathrooms, of course), it was this site, with its maze of undistinguished, reach-me-down buildings, which ...”

“... tonally very alike: perhaps he would have gone on writing more or less the same book, à la Greene/Green/Compton-Burnett. But I doubt it. In any case, Powell had a 12-year break from fiction, a thing very few novelists have ever had, and his next book after What’s Become of Waring (1939) was A Question of Upbringing (1951), the first volume of the 12-novel ...”

“... or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the Green Party used to introduce last month’s election broadcast – divided the history of the planet into Six Days of Creation, each 666 million years long. On this now familiar scale, dinosaurs appear at 4 p.m. on the last day and have disappeared by 9 ...”

“... so appeared to float above glass curtain walls. It was expensively decorated, with partitions of green Tinian marble, etched glass and golden onyx that could be illuminated from within. They divided the floor like a De Stijl painting, and the interiors were sparsely furnished with thick black carpet, red drapes and Mies’s now ubiquitous Barcelona ...”

“... personalities, sociopaths, bulimics, schizophrenics of every type – are foreign, tropical, green roses and striped plants that are hard to understand. I seek their scents and sounds, to enter deeply into their cupped, closed worlds because that is the struggle lying at the core of me.’ Beneath the barrage of very distressing prose, Slater’s ...”

“... Before the fall of Kabul, Basir was responsible for the Salang, a valley rougher and less green than Massoud’s Panjshir. But the Salang, too, had its villages of mud houses stacked into forts on outcrops and ridges of naked rock, looking down on little plots of corn, groves of mulberry trees and the willows by the river. From each village Basir drew ...”