“... is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human? Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green? Are the things so strange and marvellous you see or have seen? It is probably the only moment in Whitman’s poetic corpus where he sounds almost like Thomas Hardy. Whitman certainly seems to have found the effects of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the ...”

“... for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the window of the ...”

“... traits. We could be, as they say, ‘colour blind’, treating those traits, as we treat the green in someone’s eyes, as features that point to nothing beyond themselves, above all nothing that would warrant different treatment or differences in respect. It is hard, however, to imagine such a world without seeming naive or disingenuous, for it would be ...”

“... for food, for peace. A columnar tree cuts across ashlar. Greys tending to lilac, mauve and olive green set off the plain white bowls of the orphans and the clean bandages of the wounded. The glowing oil lamp in the foreground and the sash window illuminated in the sober terrace beyond are at once marvellous and mundane, as light always is in Piero’s ...”

“... boundaries in nature, and this is one of the most astounding: from the west, you can hike up a green mountain slope and come to the divide, where you look over at the beginning of a thousand miles or more of desert, stand in patches of deep snow from the winter before and look at a terrain that receives only a few inches of moisture a year. In most of ...”

“... too. 20 January. Note how much pleasure I get from anemones. I love their Victorian colours, their green ruffs and how, furry as chestnuts, the blooms gradually open and in so doing turn and arrange themselves in the vase, still retaining their beauty even when almost dead, at every stage of their life delightful. I used to like freesias for their scent (and ...”

“... remarks and the charge by the England footballer Tyrone Mings that the government had given ‘the green light to racism’ only to feign outrage when faced with the consequences. The feigning continued. ‘I do not genuinely think the Honourable Lady is accusing either the prime minister of this country or, indeed, the home secretary of racism,’ Atkins ...”

“... that ‘a man that can suck that in will believe, literally believe, that the moon is made of green cheese.’ As late as 1931, it was discovered that one enumerator, committed to a mental hospital, had prepared fictitious returns in order to avoid, in the registrar-general’s phrase, ‘the difficulty of obtaining them from the public’. Despite their ...”

“... the new man Jock has become, he begins to see things in the natural world previously unnoticed: green insects on grass tips, a bird drawing long silver threads out of the running water of a stream. These perceptions are ‘like a form of knowledge he had broken through to. It was unnameable, which disturbed him, but was also exhilarating.’ The change ...”

“... prospective employers would start to pay. I flew to New York on Concorde, pausing only to buy new Green Flash sneakers in Hounslow. I had done this when I flew to New York for the Dangerous Liaisons interview over lunch at the Carlyle Hotel, and it had brought me luck. I arrived two hours before I left, and half an hour after I got to my Central Park South ...”

“... unions not being secured, the papers would band together to set up a new printing works on a ‘green field site’ using the latest technology, and tough it out together against the unions. Plan B fell foul of the inability of the Fleet Street proprietors to work together, and never got much beyond boardroom discussion. It was left to Rupert Murdoch ...”

“... called Miqbal, Abdullah, Hana and Najiba were naming their children Gladys, George, Pauline and David (as well as the all-American ‘Junior’). Yet of all the Shadid and Samara descendants only Anthony felt compelled to return to Marjayoun. Rooting himself in the soil of his family history, he hoped, would compensate for the peripatetic life of the ...”

“... alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own work with an originality that weaker ...”

“... repeal sections of the Criminal Justice Act was subsequently endorsed by the Lib Dem leadership. Green issues, too, have galvanised opposition to the Tory Government, with the road-protester ‘Swampy’, suddenly an icon for all enemies of the motor-car. At the 1994 Liberal Democrat Conference in Brighton a motion was passed calling for a royal commission ...”

“... serve as the title for dozens of the stories in this book. A man loses a one-of-a-kind Star of David while swimming at Atlantic City; ten years later, he finds it in an antique store in upstate New York. A woman living in Washington DC is mistaken by a stranger for another woman; years later, in San Francisco, the same stranger bumps into her and repeats ...”