“... or hopelessly distant bodies could be gathered within a domestic and familiar trope, the green thought in the green shade. Wordsworth notes that the epitaph tends to record the good in everyone, as if they had inhabited a world without cruelty or evil, or mere human failings: ‘the affections are their own ...”

“... York this season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and ...”

“... lit ‘first time, every time’. In Fury, Private Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a recruit as green as they come, joins a battle-hardened crew under the leadership of Sergeant Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt). It’s April 1945, and they’re about to drive like hell into the heart of Germany. For the next hour or so, Ellison learns his trade the ...”

“... the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The Central Intelligence Agency was caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s ...”

“... but now he met the youngest, 15-year-old Noel – he helped her pick up the fragments of the small green coffee cup she’d dropped. He would spend the next two years hatching schemes that would allow them to meet, most of them thwarted, by the fact that she was still at Bedales, by her protective older sisters, or by Noel herself, who held him at arm’s ...”

“... at Bafta. These sorry occasions have always been best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in ...”

“... on the island and three-quarters of its adult males were or had been convicts.) Thanks largely to Robert Hughes’s Fatal Shore (1987), Tasmania is thought of as a convict hell: a place of ferocious floggings and inhuman confinement. So it would become, but only after the transformations in its economy and polity deliberately effected by that second wave of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cold War promise of apocalypse has been kicked away only to uncover rampant nationalism and what Robert Lowell called ‘small war on the heels of small war’. Our destiny seems to lurk in terrorist outrages and unstoppable new viruses, in the city homeless, in ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Bhopal, in rising world temperatures and evaporating ...”

“... simpler. ‘Dream of London small and white and clean, the clear Thames bordered by its gardens green,’ as William Morris wrote. Such dreamers are bound to feel that our own actions have caused some of today’s ills. The most specific kind of action identifiable is government policy. One effect of British social policies in the Sixties and ...”

“... compromise. In one essay here he excuses, he almost applauds, the Victorian philosopher T.H. Green for being, as a lecturer, perplexed and perplexing. And in another, which doesn’t persuade me at all, he goes so far as to declare ‘decadent’ John Stuart Mill’s surely commonsensical observation that ‘a certain laxity in the use of language must ...”

“... art) sleeps in a feverish attitude upon a bed of snow which floats upon a glassy block of pale-green banded onyx. The tight and silky surface of the skin is contrasted with the soft powdery texture of the snow, which is itself varied, becoming in parts icier and smoother. The fur of Queen Victoria’s favourite collie in Boehm’s fine portrait, or the ...”

“... die Toten’ – ‘Blessed are the dead’), and the intensely plangent five-part Lamentations of Robert White, who died of plague in 1574, at the age of 36, along with his entire family.9 March. Europe is closing down. Flights are being cancelled. Two LRB editors have plans to go to New York, where the situation is just beginning to kick off. Sam decides to ...”