“... one sees ’em in heaps they make a fine show ... The Kale too is very good. The Wheat is up and green.’ He was an eager, Boot-like birdwatcher, but in his youth had few other aesthetic pleasures, confessing to his sister: ‘Pictures give me no pleasure, architecture a little but practically none. Sculpture absolutely none, moreover music, poetry and ...”

“... at the grotesquely luxuriant, mosquito-infested rainforest and seeing, as if in the calenture, the green meadows of England with their abundant but chastely-tinted flowers. In the landscape around Bredely he seems to have found his English Paradise, complete with Eugenia as an English Eve with whom Adamson can pretend to be a still unfallen Adam. As he ...”

“... just ahead. Windermere surpassed Keats’s expectations: ‘Beautiful water – shores and islands green to the marge – mountains all round up to the clouds’. But it wasn’t just the landscape he had come for. He longed to meet Wordsworth, the poet of liberty and humanity, the great philanthropic voice of the rural poor. He made the seven-mile pilgrimage ...”

“... of particularly interesting pages where he recognises a group of novelists, from Hans Andersen to Henry James and Proust, as presenting special difficulties of inaccessibility. I think it unsurprising that, as well as making this potentially explosive discrimination among novelists, Tucker is also fairer to Blyton than most critics are. Inglis, equally ...”

“... following year, in an essay in the catalogue published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Henry-Russell Hitchcock also included pictures of the GSA and claimed that ‘no work of British architecture could more appropriately serve as an introduction to an exhibition of Modern Architecture in England.’ The tendency to see Mackintosh primarily as a ...”

“... of social status; Amy’s family were vaguely theatrical – her father had been a manager for Henry Irving – and thought of themselves approvingly as ‘bohemians’, too good to marry into ‘trade’ (though Amy’s mother was from a family of grocers). The large brick terraced house in Clapham belonged to Amy’s family and its hallway was hung with ...”

“... and Paterson duly transfers the figure to Plath’s case by reversing its application: But that green-eyed courtesan, that vice of courts who had always stalked his halls and kept his gate – the years had steeped me in her sullen arts and my tongue grew hot with her abysmal need. Slowly, I turned it on my second Caesar until it seemed to him his every ...”

“... devotee of the Bauhaus and the International Style (named by the American architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, another hated figure), was trespassing on Betjeman country and, adding insult to injury, was doing so masquerading behind an English assumed name. By the 1960s, Pevsner’s ‘Buildings of England’ were becoming known simply as ...”

“... down a corridor where smaller works are displayed. Among miniature sculptures in a wall case is Henry Moore’s reclining figure of polished bronze, one of the artist’s first experiments with cast forms. Guggenheim ‘infinitely’ preferred the bronze version to one in lead. Its viscous, fluid character (more marked in the lead version, now in the Museum ...”

“... be marked as shallows, and often conceal hidden nasties – most obviously in Justice Shallow in Henry IV, whose burblings mask a deal of corruption. The young Christians in The Merchant of Venice are carefully engineered to appear as comic shallows to begin with: Lorenzo, Gratiano, Salerio, Solanio – which is which and who cares anyway? As the play ...”

“... are terribly important to me,’ she told Michiko Kakutani in 1979, as she caressed ‘a tiny green pillbox’. ‘I would love to just have control over my own body – to stop the pain, to stop my hand from shaking. If I were five feet ten and had a clear gaze and a good strong frame, I would not have such a maniacal desire for control because I would ...”

“... Secrecy, having invoked Hermes as the god of hermeneutics, conducted a striking interpretation of Henry Green’s Party Going, in which he was able to identify a character unnamed by Green as Hermes in person! There is, one observes, a kind of joyous superfluity about this last example: his exegesis did not depend on ...”

“... Fülöp-Miller, who in The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (1927) found Russian peasants worshipping Henry Ford and Soviet revolutionaries aiming to introduce Taylorist ‘scientific management’ to their factories; Rem Koolhaas, whose Delirious New York (1978) linked the collective dream projects of the Soviet avant-garde to the built realities of Coney Island ...”

“... By Cappercleuch we turned and saw St Mary’s Loch, a beautiful, flat mirror beneath the brown and green of the hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that ...”

“... most of it is. Even Jane Dunn finds it hard to tell things apart, at one stage mixing up Reggie Green-Wilkinson, White’s first husband, with the fictional version Archie Hughes-Follett as she relates the story of their wedding night (the same in both life and novel), when Antonia, having been warned by her mother that something so appalling was going to ...”