“... the new towns – Ortolano calls it ‘welfare state modernism’ (clean modernist lines, but in green, airy and usually low-rise estates) – ran into trouble: first, because the need to build fast and cheaply, at a time of serious shortages of materials, led to substitutions and the cutting of corners; second, because the style itself, as the privatisation ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Until the idea of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods. In the same way, psychotic delusions keep up with scientific change: the people once pursued by phantasms of the dead are now pestered by living celebrities who watch them from inside their TV sets, and those who used to confess ...”

“... where an astonishingly large number of serial killers, from Ted Bundy to Israel Keyes, from the Green River Killer to the Shoe Fetish Slayer, from the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane to the Beast of British Columbia, grew up or operated. Most of them were notably vicious in their methods, even by the high standards of the fraternity. Why there? Why ...”

“... than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.’ But his screenprint of seven rows of identical Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962) showed that not all Cokes are the same, no more so than 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans (also 1962, an annus mirabilis of sorts), because screen printing kept changing the image.Thiebaud brought with him all of what he called his cheap ...”

“... post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had ...”

“... Werfel.’ In Venice in Harry’s Bar in 1950 he meets a man whom he introduces to all as Henry Green: He asked me to lunch the next day. I was surprised to find him accompanied at lunch by an obvious piece of Limehouse trade: I’d not thought H. Green ‘so’. I started to talk about books etc, but Mr ...”

“... difficulty, but he did not fully resolve it, even implicitly. Roughly, I know what ‘That tree is green’ means by knowing, among other things, what ‘is green’ means; but my knowledge of what ‘is green’ means consists in my knowing what it means to say, of any specific ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... he had lived mostly in Greece. He still painted landscapes, but his work had none of the damp, green, memory-sodden melancholy of the English and Welsh valleys. The light in them was sharp, reflected off the Aegean; his palette in paintings such as Landscape, Hydra (1960-62) shimmers. The figures in these vivid landscapes were seldom single: they were ...”

“... Does Peter Lake​ ever sleep? Even at 666 pages this is not the longest of his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue, no inanimate sentences. Behind the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure ...”

“... elders have his blood. Their fate is in their veins. In the eyes of the mob, the gutter press, the green-ink subscribers to Hatebook and the spite chorus that dances on reputation, they will soon be reckoned fair game: one false move, one barney in a Croxteth pub, one liaison with a granny of the night. These creatures irresistibly recall another unusual ...”

“... for short – within walking distance of Notting Hill. In the 1950s, the area was the domain of Peter Rachman, the Polish-born refugee turned slum landlord who exploited the hostility of the housing market towards Black immigrants, buying up run-down houses in Paddington and North Kensington and renting them to desperate people at extortionate ...”

“... wakes during the poignant Hanukkah scene. Suddenly there was a crash from below the attic. The Green Police? The Gestapo? Everybody onstage froze. Straining to hear. For a few seconds there was total silence and then something in Moses short-circuited. Not rising, but propelled out of his seat, he hollered ‘Look in the attic! She’s hiding in the ...”

“... real world and an ideal alternative. Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them ...”