“... will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm)./And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.’ These curtailed, interrupted, suspended activities correspond to a present tense that has been abruptly abolished. Mourning is a wound that is also somehow an achievement. It’s no small thing to call on the brain to ...”

“... a dish and expect you to do the cooking yourself’. Towards the end of his life, his attacks on Henry James, Katherine Mansfield – a ‘neurotic, sick woman’ – and even Chekhov, whom he’d once admired, were frequent and hysterical. For good measure, he began to make disobliging remarks about mass-educated white-collar workers. ‘They have no ...”

“... the two. Always the dandy, he might be seen in a suit of ‘bird’s eye orange’ lined with pea-green satin; or another of ‘striped strawberry coloured corded silk with spangl’d buttons’; or, bizarrely, a suit made entirely of beaver fur. But these garbs, which were among the items auctioned off at Christie’s after his death, do not disguise an ...”

“... exciting half hour of my life, under those great vertical 15 second rivers of orange or blue or green lightning, & great skyfulls of blazing thorns, & continuous overhead thunder, with great long swells coming along the gunwales, pouring in on both sides, one man bailing like mad, the rest paddling & yelling, & our sail like a map of the world in giant rips ...”

“... are less likely than Faulkner’s to be snatched into a metaphysical empyrean. She doesn’t, as Henry James would say, ‘cultivate the high pitch and beat the big drum’. What interests her is not so much their existential dilemmas as their physical and moral landscape, the enclosing objects, in which she allows herself virtually to disappear: their ...”

“... gold-orange hair that refused to remain tidy. She had a clear pale complexion, small bright green eyes, zany red lips, broadly rouged in a carefully chosen colour, and an infectious giggle. Her bangles slipped down to her elbow as she waved a welcome with a cigarette held in a long ivory holder. ‘What Mary liked most,’ Virgil Thomson ...”

“... eskimo in his igloo, the bedouin in his tent or the Englishman in his semi really lust for deep green marble floors, Tiffany glassware, five-foot-wide walnut staircases, private lifts and faux-Sheraton cabinets that roll back to reveal television screens. But the zest of Wolfe’s depiction of modern times arises in largest part from his endearingly ...”

“... theatre, and offers an appealing reading of the second parts of Tamburlaine the Great and Henry IV. As characters who determinedly resist closure, Tamburlaine and Falstaff, he observes, are ideal subjects for a sequel. In an essay on 18th-century women writers, Betty Schellenberg sets out the full range of sequel types: the continuation of a ...”

“... Ada in the name of a garden and an initiative inspired by her insistence on the right of all to green space. As so often when left-wingers are memorialised, all mention of their politics is tacitly omitted. Were they living today, the Salters would be disowned by the faction currently in charge of the Labour Party. Ada Salter refused to fly the Union Jack ...”

“... the fires of Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne somewhere near Maastricht. The Stone Bomb Woodford Green, Essex is not the easiest place in which to seek out a largely forgotten work of public sculpture. Driving north out of London, you can hardly miss the huge bronze figure of Winston Churchill scowling over the empty ...”

“... was other fare: in 1865 an ex-convict fondly remembered ‘capital dumplings … made with small green parrots, more common than sparrows’. Boyce sums up: Ordinary Britons in the early 19th century (and the Irish for much longer still) did not expect to have much in the way of possessions; meeting the essentials of life on a day-to-day basis was their ...”

“... there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s birth); there’s one by Henry Lamb, painted in 1914; there’s one by Dora Carrington from 1916. In Meade’s book, I was most struck by the following passage about a party in Los Angeles. (Parker, in addition to writing both poetry and fiction, not to mention reviews for the New ...”

“... of Ryan and the governor, Scott Walker; 80 per cent of the women among them oppose Trump. Around Green Bay the population is largely descended from immigrants from the Benelux countries, including the highest percentage of ethnic Belgians in the US, and they are moderates who reliably vote Republican. (Kessler was full of trivia: the town of Holland has ...”

“... and Suffolk. They came through the disorder of the 15th century intact, swore allegiance to Henry Tudor, gained security of property and found knighthoods, seats in Parliament and minor positions at court. In the 16th century another Clement, a sea captain and courtier, built a great fortune from what was more or less piracy. The reckless strain in the ...”

“... cut into sheets. Early European paper bears the marks of this messy process. On a letter sent to Henry III by Berengaria of Castile sometime between 1217 and 1230, the oldest piece of paper to survive in an English archive, it’s still possible to make out the undissolved textile threads. Paper took its medieval European name from the papyrus of the ...”