“... We’re driving through the remnants of a countryside: there are tiny peasant houses and bright green vegetable patches, a stork’s nest on a pillar in a dusty field. The air is full of chemical stink, and the trees seem to be struggling. There are half-built houses and industrial developments everywhere. And mosques. There’s a building boom in ...”

“... Barrett, who died of cancer in 1961 – Barrett was nearly 16. (There was Roger Waters, too, and David Gilmour – who’d replace Barrett within moments, almost, of the band’s success. Both were Cambridge boys. Both, Willis tells us, had messed around with paint pots in a late-toddler phase in the same Saturday morning art club as Barrett at Homerton ...”

“... perceptively as Steen Eiler Rasmussen, who saw it in 1937 as The Unique City. More recently, both David Piper in his Companion Guide (1964) and Christopher Hibbert in Biography of a City (1969) have written with elegance and comprehension, the first closer to the form of the traditional guidebook, the second to the style of the popular historian. Yet there is ...”

“... in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up present errors and undermine present conclusions, evidence now available proves that some things almost certainly did happen and others did not.’ Freedman’s parents, Jewish refugees who settled in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... perceptual and moral insight that it might appear. ‘Against Portraits’ and ‘A Self-Portrait: David’, both from later collections, make such insecurity their theme. The poet prefers here a face half-hesitant, face at a threshold. Still, his poems remain preserved, for reasons given in ‘Against Extremity’, from more threatening instabilities of the ...”

“... She and her family had just applied for permanent residency in the US. After sending in their green card applications, the family leave for a road trip to the desert southwest. In Oklahoma they first hear the news reports about the children at the border. By the time they’ve driven through Texas and into New Mexico, Luiselli writes in her book Tell Me ...”

“... groups’ trained in counter-insurgency and the guerrilla tactics of covert war. The Green Berets thus occupied a special place in the Kennedy hall of pride, despite the regular army’s distaste for the inegalitarianism of élite units and for the potential political abuse of forces which lay outside the regular chain of command. Jack gave the ...”

“... and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan. David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came ...”

“... in the late 1960s, are no longer central to his achievement. Cutting It Short isn’t the David Lodge novel that its English title seems to promise; indeed, one of the things that is to be docked – twice, and excruciatingly – by the heroine, who happens to be Hrabal’s mother, Marie, is the tail of a dog. This was the 1920s, and suddenly ...”

“... room from wardrobe and make-up as ‘Madeleine’ is ecstatic but very scary. Hitchcock gives it a green glow to signal sexual abandon, but the colour is filled with danger warnings and sickliness. The detective’s vertigo is revealed at last as helpless sexual blindness. He cannot see Judy, or feel for her distress. Earlier in the story, Gavin will have ...”

“... in the Dolomites. On the ledge which was now our goal, huge tumps of sea-thrift bulbed out like green brains. As Ed’s silhouette merged with the silhouette of one tump, I saw it as a thought absorbed back into a mind. When I told him this fifteen minutes later, he laughed and said: ‘Oh no! I hoped they were breasts, and I was suckling up to them!’ As ...”

“... on the field, compact, self-contained, quintessentially Australian in his weather-beaten baggy green cap, but also fidgety and uncertain, his close-set, small, deliberately blinking eyes striving to give off an air of preternatural calm while also hinting at a vacancy and a sense of drift underneath. I spent the first part of the series convinced he ...”

“... for them by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, with a curiously shaped white ceiling, white walls and a green-khaki rubberised floor. It was a space described by Kasmin as ‘a machine for looking at pictures in’; those pictures, moreover, were prototypes of the new art. They looked as if they had been painted to be seen in museums: the space was designed for ...”

“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel. Burroughs expired in 1997, and although Cronenberg has directed many films since then – operas too – while dabbling in graphic novels and other writings, Consumed is his first full-length work of fiction ...”