“... that dress was as black as a starless night and she’s ruined it by making it an idiotic green.’ Or: ‘Is that what she really thought of me, back then?’ Or: ‘I’m glad I’m not one of those vulnerable people who isn’t in the book.’ Or: ‘Fuck! That minor character is me. Me, a very minor character.’ Ceci n’est pas une pipe. It’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no botanist, no philosopher of wild places. He’s away before the dog accompanists are let into a green oasis that operates like the Marshalsea Prison: if you are inside when the bell sounds, you stay the night. Low-level flats, from an era of less boastful regeneration, are set back from the road behind cushions of coarse grass, teardrop flower-beds planted ...”

“... I must confess (and I imagine most of your contemporaries would confess the same thing) that I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say, – but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife, and spent most of the time fishing ... and was ...”

“... sort of audio or audio-visual life, but the relatively recent personifications by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet dominate most memories. None of these figures much resembles the ‘short, stout, elderly man, his hair cut en brosse’ that Agatha Christie describes. Well, they often manage the stout bit, but for the rest they are tallish, more ...”

“... of Russian farmhouses. Frequently churches stand in these yards, just as on a large village green. So the street is augmented by the dimension of landscape.When Benjamin visited, a gateway marked a passage between modes of life. Now, the wooden sheds he saw in the yards behind the buildings have given way to rows of steel carapaces, like small freight ...”

“... 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 ...”