“... ties, turtlenecks or Nehru jackets are the rule for men, with only four neck dimples in sight: Henry VIII as a young man, heavily jewelled, but in a scoop-neck shirt beneath his doublet; and three men of the 1930s in the liberal uniform of an open-necked blue shirt – the anthropologist Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne, Stephen Spender and Sir William ...”

“... there had been no good way not to fight. Thomson’s father took him to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in 1945, the year after its release. ‘He said it was a matter of duty.’ The standard British movie fare of the day had plenty of ‘syrup’, he recalls, to ladle over the ‘suet pudding’ of tremulous national morale.Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), in ...”

“... Penguin translation. Back then, their classics were distinguished by the overall jacket colour: green for France, red for Russia, olive-green for Germany, purple and brown for the Classical world, and so on. The book was too subtle for me, of course, and I failed to find it at all erotic. I doubt I understood the scene in ...”

“... in suspicion or a kind of dread. Under the sketch the artist Gérard has scribbled: ‘eyes green, complexion pale: coat of green stripe, gilet blue on white, cravat red on white’. A man, as Belloc put it, for colour rather than ornament. The face is still very young; the expression is closed, guarded, as if he had ...”

“... was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where ...”

“... As one of his most cited bons mots puts it, a garden is not a retreat but an attack, and the green thoughts he thinks in his version of pastoral are as often as not Venus fly-traps of aggression, though none the less verdant for that. The fight isn’t entirely his alone, for all that camaraderie is hard to come by. Midway finds the British avant-garde ...”

“... through the open window; the tablecloth and door glow with a mother of pearl sheen in the blue-green light of the garden (Bonnard often used waves of pastel paint to create shimmering outlines and surfaces, particularly for flesh). Interior and exterior are one. But in other works at Tate Modern, Landscape at Le Cannet (1928), say, it’s harder to see ...”

“... it witty, astringent, persuasive: all those impressions are mixed up in my memory with the strong green of the Penguin Crime paperback. The novel was probably twenty years old when I read it, fifty years or so ago – it was first published in 1951, when Tey was in her mid-fifties. A twenty-year-old book can still feel contemporary, but seventy years old in ...”

“... of retching’. Amid ‘the emetic stink of vomit’, passengers receive rations of ‘fatty, green-tinged meat’ and drink ale, since the water, like the biscuits, was ‘full of tiny, wriggling creatures’.We know that Whalley and Goffe hid out near New Haven because, as the earliest local histories record, two Boston-based Royalists – a ...”

“... role of physician, mixing and prescribing her own patent remedy, a concoction of boiled snails, green herbs and mutton fat. Relegated soon afterwards to the more humble role of gardener, she brought the same artful mimicry of idiom and manner to the part. ‘One day, upon my mother’s paying me a visit in the garden and approving something I had done ...”

“... Apocrypha, scribbled over by John Barton when he was at King’s, with blacklead for Shakespeare, green for Greene and, jokily, orange for Peele. This is the good thing about ‘Shall I die?’, that it drives you back to the ‘margins’ of the oeuvre. And what a play you find there! Reading the Countess of Salisbury scenes for the first time since ...”

“... purposes. Still, many a Senior Fellow must have wept to see his college grounds diminished, its green reduced, for the sake of demonstrating that Trinity was indeed an Irish university. But it must be acknowledged that Trinity has made these important changes with every show of good will. Indeed, so far as the question of public relations arises, Trinity ...”

“... or daylight description soaks on to the paper easily enough. But down here, in silver-green East Anglia, I am indolentminded, and the mapping out of my delicious colloquies with Edmund seems to be continually postponed.’ He seems to have been very sensitive to the atmosphere in which he wrote: whether this is a virtue in a diarist or a mark of ...”

“... red beret on his head, splayed shoes like frogs’ feet (familiar from portraits of the young Henry VIII), and a reticule of green velvet in the shape of a heart hanging from a ribbon at his thigh. Two years later, in the most startling diptych, he stripped off completely and had himself depicted unsparingly, back and ...”

“... ruins of her luxurious family home, she tears down the last sign of childhood wealth, the green velvet curtains, to make a dress. In my memory, Maisie in Henry James’s novel scarcely leaves the lush Victorian interiors whichever adult she finds herself with. Colin, the son of the dour Yorkshire house in The Secret ...”