“... in The Grapes of Wrath; the departing son is like those who have to leave their homeland in How Green Was My Valley or wander stateless like Ford’s Mary of Scotland and like every cowboy he put on the screen. The Quiet Man, a sentimental favourite with the Irish, promotes a central myth among tribes of that sort: the myth of the man returning home to ...”

“... Lime and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed to ...”

“... the arrival and settlement in 1639 of a band of Puritans under the leadership of the Reverend Henry Whitfield. State and local authorities have legislated for the preservation of numerous buildings, four districts and the town green: there are five museums in historic houses; an energetic preservation alliance; and ...”

“... the cawing of seagulls so well that he can translate poetry into it, and notes that the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are particularly suited to this purpose. Reviling the culture of ownership, Gould feels ‘out of joint with the rest of the human race’. He dresses in the cast-off clothes of his friends. On winter days he stuffs an insulating layer ...”

“... death. On returning from his Italian travels in 1858, Eastlake would have found his friend Austin Henry Layard working on the proofs of a long article on fresco painting which appeared that October in the Quarterly Review. It is here that we find the first modern expression in print of the conviction that Piero was an artist of the first rank. We can be ...”

“... Communists known as the ‘White Terror’, launched in collaboration with the city’s underworld Green Gang. Showing the self-interested flexibility that marked his long career, Chiang then allowed his hoodlum associates to turn on the businessmen in a wave of extortion and kidnapping that provided a flow of funds to the government he established in ...”

“... couple who both supported the IG and exposed Hamilton to Duchamp – most importantly, to The Green Box, the book of notes detailing the making of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a.k.a. The Large Glass. At this time, too, together with Paolozzi and Henderson, Hamilton began to haunt natural history museums, to comb through glossy ...”

“... Lord Percy in Blackadder, whose alchemical pursuits engender not gold but a nugget of purest ‘green’, Morton had made some ‘black’.Successful alchemists tend to be fictional. Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist (1988) is a meditation on following your dream. His alchemist really can turn lead into gold, using the fabled philosopher’s stone: an ...”

“... from every corner of the earth. The very best ironies live their lives inside other ironies. Henry VIII changed his relationship with the Catholic Church so as to enable himself to marry his chosen bride. (Sadly, something happened to her.) Five hundred years later, Prince Charles changes the date of his wedding to his chosen bride so as to attend the ...”

“... in the state in which he possessed and left them.’The presence of a one-volume collection of Henry More’s Philosophical Poems, Platonic Song of the Soul (‘fine copy, gilt edges’) and a ‘good sound copy’ of Speght’s 1598 Chaucer added to the collection’s value. But so, paradoxically, did the battered condition of the other books. Lamb’s ...”

“... mail-order catalogue, whose pages they have only just begun to turn. But, like Jay Gatsby’s green light, their artificial paradise is destined to remain a promise of the future, a narcissistic fantasy. For all Perec’s stylistic sangfroid one can detect in this prose the shadow of a master whom he did not mention in his Warwick lecture: the inventor of ...”

“... with anyone but other educated Punjabi-speaking Hindu Jats’, she borrows money for a forged Green Card. The Professor is not a professor: he splits human hair into batches in a basement under the Khyber Bar BQ. Her new job is as ‘caregiver’ or ‘day-mummy’ to Duff, the adopted daughter of Taylor and Wylie, liberal New York achievers. The ...”

“... of proper Scotland than could ever be accomplished by laws, statesmen or associations,’ wrote Henry Cockburn. After Scott’s death, the most significant literary figure in Edinburgh was not a Scotsman, but the reclusive Thomas de Quincey. Mr Royle treats him to a passing tip of the hat while he evokes the great magazines – as a friend of ‘Christopher ...”

“... instantly mythologised, as it were, and communicated to the sympathetic reader. When Prince Henry was christened, what poet but Hughes would have been inspired to dash off a ‘Rain-Charm’, celebrating a downpour that ended a drought, and set the salmon free to leap up over West Country weirs? The splendid poem chants a liberation of rivers – the ...”

“... his bedazzled readers would never have accepted them, as they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He ...”