“... presiding presence; his poetry is the bar before which other poets –Auden and Eliot, Hardy and Robert Lowell and Browning. Pound and, yes, Hill – are brought to judgment. This is not overt. Robinson can’t, any more than the rest of us, come on like a latter-day Leavis, a fearlessly normative critic; instead, psychologists and moral philosophers are ...”

“... doubt my obsession with Somalia had something to do with pride in having crossed Mogadishu’s ‘green line’, and drawn a warning round or two from armed looters in the port. I suspect, however, that the real attraction lay in the fact that so few others knew quite how good the Somalia story was, or indeed quite how bad. The few others became many in ...”

“... of Kafka’s art. Chief among these were the voices of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Marthe Robert and Erich Heller. Heller’s essay on The Castle in The Disinherited Mind (1952) marked a real turning point. He argued persuasively that it was folly to go on debating whether Kafka was religious or anti-religious, Marxist or bourgeois, Calvinist or ...”

“... spell in Newgate Prison, a substantial fine and three sessions in the public pillory, but Robert Harley, a member of the administration that had prosecuted him, recognised that such a gifted journalist might prove useful in government service. The administration arranged for his fine to be paid via an intermediary out of secret service funds. Defoe ...”

“... novel Smoke. In postwar Leeds, the city in which McKie grew up, the corporation buses were green – a colour chosen, he recalls, because the Conservatives objected to the implicit socialism of the city’s red trams. The buses helped to define the town: ‘Their corporate presence spoke of continuity, civic pride and a sense of place, where the ...”

“... we believe the words enough? Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth? When Robert Louis Stevenson died his business-minded Scottish nanny quietly began selling locks of the infant’s hair which she claimed to have cut forty years earlier. The believers, the seekers, the pursuers bought enough hair to stuff a sofa. The house of Croisset ...”

“... The first grieving person to arrive was a big man in his late fifties, wearing a yellow and green polo shirt stretched tight over his stomach. I realised that he was one of the people we were all here for because the words ‘Can I help you?’ seemed to sink into him, rather than leaving him unaffected, or making him conventionally polite, or ...”

“... church was decked with holme, ivie, bayes, and whatever the season of the year afforded to be green.’ Medieval poets and painters depicted the nativity scene full of flowers and April breezes; it was inconceivable that such a day could be bleak. It took a more sentimental age to romanticise the dark and cold (perhaps because they were further away from ...”

“... of meticulous damage. His ‘haruspication of pods’ in the title poem ‘Pea Soup’ are green victims who cascade their entrails to a jab of the thumb ‘like so many plump suspension-dots’. The pretty epanorthosis of ‘meticulous damage’ would have been appreciated by readers of The Shepheard’s Calender, connoisseurs of tropes such as ...”

“... from the Latin for ‘calling’. Some poets still take it literally. ‘There is a language green and aeon-deep; Edened,’ Camille Ralphs writes in After You Were, I Am (Faber, £12.99). She wants to take us from ‘Genesis to English’, plumbing the ‘damb grammars of creation’, ‘those dreams of earth fluoressing/from some primal noun’. The ...”

“... as Stiomrebhaigh), a site of extraordinary beauty and habitability, is still mantled in dense green turf, backed by an outcrop for building stone, with a peat moss just yards away. The best houses were roomy, with vegetable fields enclosed by stone dykes. A stand of aspens chatters on the bluff above a river flowing out of a circular tidal lochan which ...”

“... Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She was influenced by the work of the American painter Robert Henri, who had founded the Ashcan School – a movement that championed gritty depictions of urban scenes. ‘I didn’t want to be taught Impressionism,’ Neel explained. ‘I didn’t see life as Picnic on the Grass. I wasn’t happy like Renoir.’ Her ...”

“... the blinding flash of the first atomic explosion revealed their labours had not been in vain.J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the Manhattan Project and hence ‘father of the atomic bomb’, was never openly remorseful. But he was nothing if not ambivalent, as Ray Monk makes clear in his superb biography. When the fireball burst Oppenheimer ...”

“... and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his son’s arrested political development brings him back to the quarrels of a previous generation. Many people are liberated by the death of a dominant parent: Horace felt the full burden of his past only when ...”

“... 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 ...”