“... the security fences: distant pops and small blossoms of flame. Inside, pretty much everything was green. Pea green for the walls with dark green trim and cement floors. Bulletins about security, sermons on the dangers of high voltage. A workbench with test equipment ran along the south ...”

“... All the Fays. There is concern at the Palace. Even the Cabinet war-council is cruising for some green relief, some planetary crisis to get them off the hook. Publishers have only to bring into focus all this universal, non-specific weather angst, then to feed it, fan it, explain it away. The resultant, glossy anthologies of climatic irregularities – acid ...”

“... of one, in Ontario last October. A few weeks after the Thistle opened, a batch of so-called ‘green heroin’, which contains nitazenes (synthetic opioids as powerful as fentanyl), arrived in the Central Belt, and the nurses had to deal with two or three overdoses a day. The green heroin was so potent that people ...”

“... as first minister. The independence movement has splintered; the party is mired in scandal. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the SNP’s former chief executive, has been charged with embezzlement, while Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader, Humza Yousaf, had to resign after ill-advisedly cancelling the party’s co-operation agreement with ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter Porter. He was an Australian immigrant in London, and had written a lot of poems, but published relatively few; she was a nurse who seemed ‘very English’ in accent and tastes, and was admired for having a figure like a ballet dancer. They set up home ...”

“... in 1867. Prometheus in fleshy earthenware sprawled on the gleaming turquoise dome of the lid. A green-gold eagle perched on his thigh and belly, and tore at his crimson liver. The tall handles were blond-bearded chained Titans in mail shirts. A vase here sounds much like a stage set, or even the performance of a play. When, a few pages later, in this same ...”

“... course, which was a burden on everybody, despite the cartoons and all that guff, the play starring Peter O’Toole. Bernard was a nasty, jealous misogynist who found a perfect safe house at the Colony: so many of its regulars were nasty that your average woman-hater struggled to stand out. (He was also a ponce who stole people’s returns from the betting ...”

“... figures to lend him a cloak of respectability. Figures such as Haines, Bernard Donoughue and Peter Jay, the former British ambassador in Washington – some of the stars of the Labour governments of the 1970s – were happy to be signed up to Maxwell’s payroll. The case of Haines was especially striking: when Maxwell bought the Mirror, in 1984, Haines ...”

“... not an academic, thinks otherwise. His life of Dickens opens with the great man dead, lying on the green sofa in the dining-room of Gad’s Hill Place. But Ackroyd does not regard his subject across any fence: he knows Dickens as intimately as the man knew himself; better, perhaps, since Dickens was not great on self-knowledge. There are no lost keys, no ...”

“... sensitivity of his own circle and the military’s unthinking bravery came to mind when reading Peter Hart’s book. Hart tells the story of the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns – Egypt in 1882, Sudan in 1883-85 and 1896-98 – through the eyewitness accounts left by soldiers and journalists, with the aim of uncovering how they were experienced and ...”

“... Big City is strikingly similar to 1890s Fin de Siècle, if one replaces absinthe with cocaine, green daffodils and velvet with leather skirts from Fiorucci and Kamali silk tops, Paris with Manhattan or Los Angeles. McInerney’s decadents wear designer clothes. They run up monthly phone bills of 1300 dollars and daily coke bills that are scarcely ...”

“... argued that that a second resolution would be required – as had the attorney general, Sir Peter Goldsmith. Tony Blair himself had tried to secure a second resolution. But then, just as the negotiations for a second resolution – handled by Greenstock – failed, the attorney general changed his view, declaring that Resolution 1441 itself revived the ...”

“... of black and white and golden-brown clothing, and with the red of wine or cherries and the fresh green of vine leaves – all contained originally (as early inventories invariably indicate) by black frames. But when commissioned to paint larger and more complex narratives he abandoned this luminous clarity, darkening his pictures so that the space and the ...”

“... Paton Walsh decided to publish the novel in Britain herself, using her small personal imprint of Green Bay Books, and backed up with marketing and distribution by Colt Books of Cambridge, who initially approached HMC to handle the account. Joint Managing Director Julia Hobsbawm says: ‘The book presented us with an unmissable PR challenge: to get attention ...”