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“... in a jumble of King Arthur and Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, strongly Scandinavian though his vocabulary is, had only the ‘Brutus legend’ to guide him to his own history; four centuries later, Dr Johnson was little better informed. Some antiquarians may have noted that the names of the days of the week ...”

“... whom the protagonists dispatch. In Saturday (2005), the successful, self-satisfied neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, who happens to live on the leafy London square where McEwan lived at the time, finds his home invaded, a family gathering despoiled and his daughter stripped naked, by a thug called Baxter and his sidekick, Nige. It’s the ultimate middle-class ...”

“... and subsequent move to Milwaukee: Miss Niedecker, I guess in her fifties by now, lives in a tiny green house out at Black Hawk Island . . . Right out in back is the sparkling Rock River, on its way to Lake Koshkonong. No phone, almost no neighbours . . . The river is a major fact in her life – lying there sparkling and running, often flooding and worrying ...”

“... character, and imparted a strong dose of New World optimism to his surviving children. Of these, Henry Leigh Hunt was the youngest son, a shy, bookish child who got a rigorous, one might almost say republican, education at Christ’s Hospital in the City of London, where he was a friend of Thomas Barnes, a future editor of the Times, and a younger ...”

“... feeling a bit seasick and discovered that all the postboxes and telephone booths had been painted green. But in those pre-euro days the shops still accepted ordinary money, and my mother used to say that what she liked best about the place, apart from the Mary O’Hara records, was that with its bumpy single-track roads and straying donkeys it reminded her of ...”

“... their two small children and new baby. At Happisburgh, where the other invited guests included Henry Moore and Ivon Hitchens, Hepworth and Nicholson swam in the sea, played cricket and discussed ideas for their work. Nicholson photographed Hepworth’s naked back and Hepworth, after collecting driftwood and stones on the beach, described Nicholson’s head ...”

“... a grocer stocking Caribbean goods that he should offer credit, as is customary in the Caribbean.Henry Oliver, the man Moses is expecting, eventually arrives without cigarettes, rum or money, having gambled most of it away on the ship; he is wearing only a light suit and a pair of watchekongs to greet the ‘beast winter’. A white woman from Ladbroke Grove ...”

“... holding a butterfly. I remember she was dressed a little like the flag of Brazil: blue sweater, green skirt, and wrap gleaming like gold armour. Her nails were nicely manicured and painted a sort of pearl grey. She seemed scared in general and nervous in particular, but I think I understood it was probably just her thing, this immense sense of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a low-intensity civil war between Arabs and Jews which no longer stopped at the pre-1967 border or green line, as it is called in Israel. On both sides of the line the extremists started coming to the fore and the upshot has been an escalation in the level of violence. To check the wave of attacks on Israeli civilians and the pervasive insecurity caused by ...”

“... but because Eden’s actions were sensed to be duplicitous and therefore a blot on England’s sea-green incorruptibility. If militarism and realpolitik have disguised themselves in a blanket of duty, the alternative liberal-pacifist tradition has been equally riddled with ambiguities. In theory, Cobden’s Englishman was economic man, attending solely to his ...”

“... of Twain’s style in comparable passages. Raban weaves in phrases from other Americans as well: Henry James, Robert Lowell, further bits from T. S. Eliot. At the end of his penultimate chapter Raban prints the note he received from Boom-Boom Kelley when he and his boat detached themselves from Kelley’s tow. ‘It was the one certificate which I had most ...”

“... out by the Northern Ireland Office which roves over the idyllically beautiful landscape – those green drumlins and loughs and pebbledashed farms – and concludes with Van’s famous nostalgic last line from ‘Coney Island’: ‘Why can’t it be like this all the time?’ The view I’m given is that the British Government’s policy is to keep Sinn Fein ...”

“... 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to realise one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity.’ Bishop’s ‘timidity’ is part of the reason why, at the time of her ...”

“... occasionally quail. When she died in 1853 the local weavers planted a tree on the village green in her memory, ‘to convey an expression of their gratitude for the many gifts and favours that they had received from her’. Otherwise, as Nikolaus Pevsner noted in 1967, she was soon ‘except strictly locally, entirely forgotten’. That Pevsner should ...”