“... for her hairdresser. A year later they move into a new house in Milton Keynes. Their neighbour, Peter Horn, is a driving instructor and divorcee. Charlie persuades him to give Maureen lessons at a discount for cash, and it isn’t long before they start an affair. Maureen also takes up shoplifting: she enjoys the thrill of not getting caught, of discovering ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... preconceived notions. ‘LARKIN, Philip. The Less Deceived. Hessle: The Marvell Press, 1958. 8vo. Green cloth.’ In the first stage of his self-interrogating apprenticeship, Prynne is taking possession of the fourth edition of a lauded volume by a rival, who was never a rival, but who will in the future be weaponised against him. There is an ownership ...”

“... on a rock. ‘These are the stamps on the final envelope,’ he wrote, zeroing in on a yellow-green cluster of living organisms existing at a speed accessible to red-eyed witness. And accessible to this former Chicago copywriter with the profile and presence of the actor Jon Hamm in Mad Men. Welch, a troubled man, a drinker, was tall, red-haired, a ...”

“... in gassy contractions. The young attach themselves to a forest of artfully placed weeds: a green world underwater that looks in certain shots like the mise-en-scène of Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, released the following year. Eisenstein famously admired the protean, boneless characters in early Disney films for their ...”

“... a deprivation of liberty under Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights). In 2004 Peter Hain, then the Labour Leader of the House of Commons, introduced laws designed to curb anti-war protests in Parliament Square. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, aimed at the Iraq War protester Brian Haw, included a ban on using ...”

“... for Hugo for being able to walk. Please God he never has to march. May It’s all very green down here at the moment – lots of wild flowers and lots of your gumtrees with their barks hanging down like tattered lingerie. I saw a stork flying and heard a lark singing as though he were over Goodwood racecourse on that wonderful day when Epigram won ...”

“... Government-sponsored brochures are got up to look like supermarket giveaways. Strap headlines in green. Articles flagged in blue. Colour photos. Designed not composed. That’s how the planners (the strategists, the salaried soothsayers) see the Lea Valley: as an open-plan supermarket with a river running through it. The valley is a natural extension of the ...”

“... and whimsicalities into the author of ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ and ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’.Stevens met Elsie Viola Moll (née Kachel) in June 1904, during a visit to his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania. He had been living in New York since 1900, and had discovered the hard way that ‘the world holds an unoccupied niche ...”

“... school. Selling Russian cars on the US market. I’m trying to get Bill Clinton involved in a green project converting waste to energy: a friend of a friend was at college with Hillary.’ Everyone you meet in Little Russia seems to have another business on the side. At the Cosmos party, doctors I talked to turned out to have a line in real estate; the ...”

“... a huge leap from the ‘dauntless master’ of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company to Peter Porter among the ‘takeaways’, ‘civic galleries’ and ‘cement escarpments’ of Rusholme. When the history of indebtedness comes to be written, quirkier contributions will be charted: Eberhart’s gift to Geoffrey Hill; Muldoon’s ‘Immram’ as a ...”

“... in a fitting manner by the biggest tent show in the universe. As the Minister without Portfolio, Peter Mandelson, asserts in a document issued by the Cabinet Office: ‘millenniums only come once in a thousand years.’ Or at approximately the same interval as Labour governments with a mandate to do whatever they want, with absolutely no come-back, in the ...”

“... Mosley was still a Labour MP. Yet Everard Webley, the leader of the British Freemen, in their green uniforms ‘like the male chorus at a musical comedy’, is unmistakeably Mosley, very tall and burly, consumed with ambition and deliberately unpleasant: ‘Many people, he had found, are frightened of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity.’ Nancy ...”

“... In his book about religion, Peter Hitchens has a lot more to say about his brother Christopher than Christopher has to say about Peter in his book about himself.* ‘Some brothers get on,’ Peter writes mournfully, ‘some do not. We were the sort that just didn’t ...”

“... fact, Hanta himself is paper, pâpier-maché compacted from beer and old books and mouse nests and green and blue and metallic and ‘cobalt-coloured’ flesh flies (courtesy of wodges of kindly donated butchers’ paper), a palimpsest, a cento, a mummy, a dummy, putting his best (or is it his worst?) side forward. Materials – thoughts – come to mind and ...”