“... which Hugh owned, depicting a race at the course, with horses leaping over fences, Notting Hill is green, wooded and unrecognisable – the chimney of the kiln on what would become Pottery Lane is the only identifiable landmark. The studio of the photographer played by David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow-Up is on Pottery ...”

“... the many small groups that filled the square. Movement veterans like the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and Marina Sitrin, the author of a book about horizontal organising methods used in Argentina, conversed with twenty-somethings freshly radicalised by disappointment in the president they helped to elect. Not long after the police massed at the ...”

“... the unending monochrome winter and the brief summers that are all leaves and insects and blue and green sparkle. His poems, one reads, have been translated into fifty, then sixty, and at the last seventy, languages (which is extraordinary for anyone writing in a ‘small’ language, much less a poet). In 2011 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for ...”

“... into legs of sawdust. Trot trot goes the sadeyed ass pulling the cart and away off into the misty green mountains and the blue clouds of far away. And right over the picture there in big black letters EMERALD GEMS OF IRELAND. Emerald Gems of Ireland is a songbook and this isn’t its first appearance in The Butcher Boy. It’s first seen inside the music ...”

“... the greenhouse effect on earth. At the prompting of a geochemist and oceanographer called Charles David Keeling, the observatory of Mauna Loa on Hawaii had been collecting data on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1959. The result – the ‘Keeling curve’ – clearly showed that levels of atmospheric CO2 were rising sharply. In 1979, Jimmy Carter ...”

“... was the frequency with which he had to pare his nails. His shoes, left under the bed, turned green.’ The experiment of concision is not repeated.When Wyatt goes home for a visit, gothic values still rule the roost in the shadow of Mount Lamentation. He arrives more or less insane and carrying a gold figure of a bull. His father now worships ...”

“... defective. Sir Edward Herbert died before the Report had been signed. Mr R.B. Southall and Sir David Anderson ‘belonged’, in Mr Carswell’s words, ‘to the silent minority’. All four members of the ‘inner group’, as Mr Carswell defines it, were academics. The most serious result of the under-representation of secondary education on the ...”

“... England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ...”

“... sugar and slaves – from whom is descended one of the National Theatre’s noted actors, David Harewood. When I first showed People to the director Nicholas Hytner he remarked that it wasn’t like anything else I’d done – or anything else I’d done with him. The play, though, that does have hints of it is Getting On (1971), which, like ...”

“... as myth for a war-ravaged generation; the village at dusk, smelling of woodsmoke, surrounded by green fields; the thatched cottages and rambling gardens; the time-worn historical monuments. This was the land ‘worth fighting for’ in the propaganda of both world wars. That Morton apparently found it, many times over, in the course of his travels ...”

“... cent of Labour’s vote is ‘naturally’ – that is, under a system without tactical voting – Green. A party tempted to give up on its climate commitments ought to keep that number pinned to its desk, next to a picture of Thangam Debbonaire. Starmer has said he wants a decade to transform Britain, but his electoral base is broad, not deep, and far from ...”

“... by nominal Christians who made a great show of piety in their writing.‘Solomon, the Son of David, King of Israel, hath said that the beginning of our Key is to fear God, to adore Him, to honour Him with contrition of heart, to invoke Him in all matters which we wish to undertake, and to operate with very great devotion, for thus God will lead us in the ...”

“... an 1827 cartoon by Michael Egerton (her selection of London fog illustrators, from Cruikshank to David Langdon, adds entertainment and insight all through the book.)Corton salutes Dickens’s mastery of ‘the use of fog as extended metaphor’. And of course no fog in literature approaches that introduction to Bleak House with ‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the ...”

“... with the ferocity of Ford’s detractors (they seem to close their eyes to watch his films), but David Thomson makes a mighty-seeming case against him in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. From the 1975 edition: Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting ...”

“... in Lambeth to Farringdon; Abercrombie also proposed a tunnel under the Thames between Hither Green in Lewisham and Canning Town in Docklands that would have made it possible to travel from Southend to York, via the capital, in a single train journey. But the plan was expensive, and Britain was broke, and the way we moved goods round the country was ...”