“... how Strachey describes them: A Kinde of webbe-footed Fowle there is of the bignesse of an English green Plover, or Sea-Mewe, which all the summer we saw not, and in the darkest nights of November and December (for in the night they onely feed) they would come forth, but not fly far from home, and hovering in the ayre, and over the sea, make a strange hollow ...”

“... a diary composed in imitation 18th-century English purportedly detailing Lovecraft’s affair with Robert Barlow, a horror fan, collector and briefly Lovecraft’s literary executor. In fact Lovecraft spent six weeks at the 15-year-old Barlow’s family home in Florida at Barlow’s invitation in 1933. It was an uncharacteristic journey for the reclusive and ...”

“... into what Walpole, wilfully misquoting Pope, referred to as a Gothic Vatican. The house acquired a Green Closet, an armoury, a Holbein Chamber and the Tribune, a jewel-like space, top-lit through stained glass, with ‘the air of a Catholic Chapel’. Walpole described the effect he was aiming for as ‘gloomth’. If the house was strange, the contents were ...”

“... through those they admire, and the heroes whom Chatwin celebrates here, apart from Rock, include Robert Byron and Ernst Jünger. With Byron he shared a boyish romanticism sophisticated by intellect, a sense of the bizarre, and the gift of descriptive exactitude. In the chapter on Ernst Jünger’s Diaries (which he subtitles ‘An Aesthete at War’), he ...”

“... prospective employers would start to pay. I flew to New York on Concorde, pausing only to buy new Green Flash sneakers in Hounslow. I had done this when I flew to New York for the Dangerous Liaisons interview over lunch at the Carlyle Hotel, and it had brought me luck. I arrived two hours before I left, and half an hour after I got to my Central Park South ...”

“... unions not being secured, the papers would band together to set up a new printing works on a ‘green field site’ using the latest technology, and tough it out together against the unions. Plan B fell foul of the inability of the Fleet Street proprietors to work together, and never got much beyond boardroom discussion. It was left to Rupert Murdoch ...”

“... that somewhere along the line he absorbed the influence, for example, of the Minnesota poets, Robert Bly and James Wright. He has the same candour and simplicity, and, like them, sometimes lays himself open to a charge of naivety – technical as much as emotional, if we can distinguish between the two. But his naivety, if such it is, differs ...”

“... on the edge of Hampstead Heath and one of the finest surviving examples of the mature designs of Robert Adam. Two years later, Lord Iveagh died, bequeathing Kenwood to the nation, along with 63 Old Master and 18th-century British paintings from his own collection, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough and Reynolds, as an example of the ...”

“... Bardrochat, the other family house, an Arts and Crafts mansion in Ayrshire with a music room by Robert Lorimer. The genial chaos of country house life disconcerted some visitors. The photographer Lee Friedlander thought it was like ‘being in the middle of a British novel’, speculating that there were probably people who stayed the whole summer. McEwen ...”

“... branch of the ‘identity’ lobby spoke of the new affinity it felt with Californian poets like Robert Duncan. Again, the word ‘geography’ was used: it made geographical sense for Australians to cosy up with San Francisco. To balance the provincial angst, there were also a number of sneering cosmopolitans, but they tended not to sit on platforms. They ...”

“... was noisy, lively, inventive – a ‘political carnival’, as Lynn Bennie, James Mitchell and Robert Johns describe it in their new book, Surges in Party Membership: The SNP and Scottish Greens after the Independence Referendum (Routledge, £135). Its ‘innovative campaigning methods’ included ‘campaign stalls, impromptu flash mobs, city marches and ...”

“... her: “John Peel – what? You mean the dead disc jockey?” And then I said: “Don’t you mean Robert Peel? Cos if it was John Peel, we’d all be known as Johnnies.”’ This gets a really good laugh and Jim, who is cut from rather rougher cloth than the officers from the serious and organised crime squad, develops his theme. ‘I mean, speaking of ...”

“... so appeared to float above glass curtain walls. It was expensively decorated, with partitions of green Tinian marble, etched glass and golden onyx that could be illuminated from within. They divided the floor like a De Stijl painting, and the interiors were sparsely furnished with thick black carpet, red drapes and Mies’s now ubiquitous Barcelona ...”

“... On a green hill​ above a lake in my local park in Leeds, there is a handsome stone structure. The Barrans Fountain was built by the Victorian clothing manufacturer Sir John Barran, once also the city’s mayor. He must have been a man with ambition. A building he constructed in the city centre is Moorish and beautiful, a small glimpse of Granada in the middle of West Yorkshire, though it was nothing more grand than a warehouse ...”

“... 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 ...”