“... whose circumscription we may set All solitudes of love, room for love’s face, Love’s projects green with leaves, Love’s monuments like tombstones on our lives. ‘The Broken Bowl’ typifies the meretricious humourlessness of Merrill’s early poetry. The later work has none of this menacing generality, and the paralysing cast of the grand style is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Although it sets out to explore the lives of Fred and Rosemary West – along with Peter Sutcliffe, the most notorious figures in recent British criminal history – Happy like Murderers reads more like a novel than a documentary. In this respect, it recalls Truman Capote’s ‘novel of fact’, In Cold Blood, which made compelling fiction out of the brutal and senseless murder of an apparently typical American family in rural Kansas, and created a new genre on the way ...”

“... Then in Leviathan, published some years later, Auster uses the same initials for the narrator, Peter Aaron; and anagrammatic sleight of hand (Delia/Lydia, Iris/Siri: Auster’s real-life loves past and present) further blurs the boundaries between his facts and his fictions. So one approaches his openly autobiographical Hand to Mouth with ...”

“... love life. Ghastly from the start, Enderby’s lyrics are further debased when he arrives at the Peter Brooke Theater, Terrebasse, Indiana (‘To be or not to be/Smitten by you/Bitten by you ...’), and Shakespeare, outraged, fights back. Enderby is not surprised. ‘We were all warned,’ he says Burgessly, ‘about disturbing his bones. There’s a curse ...”

“... to excellent hospitals. Much of the fighting was done by Special Forces, among them the élite Green Berets, many of whom, he discovered, were recent immigrants into the USA, or social misfits. In other words, they had a good deal in common with the Foreign Legion. Other hearty killers were the South Korean auxiliaries. ‘Any prisoners they took were ...”

“... doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is revealing, that textual arm around ...”

“... The setting in the crypt is unsympathetic – the gloomy ‘In’ and ‘Out’ corridors with green lino floors are no doubt necessary in the busy pilgrimage season – and I have anyway never had much of a thing for alleged holy relics. From the cathedral a pleasant auto-rickshaw ride through the old streets of Mylapore took me to Little Mount, a rocky ...”

“... road’ continue to jostle idealists who wonder why nobody has yet built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. Nowhere is this more obvious than when British commentators contemplate the successes and failures of the post-war British polity. To celebrate the launching of the Institute of Contemporary British History, ...”

“... in The Art of Edward Thomas open out the issues, but a whiff of poet’s corner lingers on. Pace Peter Levi, it is not quite enough to celebrate Thomas as ‘certainly genuine, authentic, a true poet’. Under Storm’s Wing is a welcome reprint of Helen Thomas’s As it was and World without End, first published in 1926 and 1931. It also contains a ...”

“... the stairs, and emitted a belching roar over a middle-aged man sitting with a woman on one of the green leather seats. Alan Sillitoe. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ‘Belching roar’ is, I think, bloody good (you notice that Sillitoe is writing so plastered that it reads as if it’s the poor old temptation that fell down the stairs), and I like the ...”

“... the side of the regime.  A chat with a prominent economic commentator. He sees definite signs of green shoots. The stock market and the pound are rising, the banks and the housing market have stabilised. ‘The measures taken last autumn have stopped an immediate crisis.’  Rumours that unnamed backbenchers are organising a round robin letter, calling on ...”

“... struggles, Irish history, and weapons and explosives. These were eventually collected in the Green Book, the IRA manual. IRA volunteers, especially those who were known to the security forces, were channelled into Sinn Fein, where they could promote street politics and build community structures as an alternative to those of the British-run state. There ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... old-fashioned pinafore, her hands clasped in front of her, before a riotous background of mottled green and pitch black. A mass of foliage? A camouflage pattern? A homage to Clyfford Still’s late style? The black extends to the bottom of the image to form the simply demarcated ground on which the girl stands. This is no place: this is a vision, a painted ...”