“... sitting on a park bench, wearing a flat cap and a raincoat buttoned up to the neck, listening to Peter Cook. I was drawn in, however, almost against my will. Cathcart points out that we are less interested in the weather than we are supposed to be. While British people do talk about the weather, he says, that does not mean they care about it. I think it goes ...”

“... with the feast of colour in the gallery. ‘Emerging from Turner’s heliocentric cathedral,’ Peter Conrad wrote in the Observer, ‘I felt I had cataracts: it takes time to re-accustom your dazzled eyes to the wan, monochrome mock-up we call reality.’ Turner, and his great advocate Ruskin, would surely have sighed with impatience at these ...”

“... the gates of Vienna; the Californian venture capitalist’s belief in the coming Singularity; deep Green projections of ecosystem collapse; medics’ warnings of antibiotic resistance; the ever present threat of financial meltdown. These visions of catastrophic change are a dramatisation, on the largest scale, of the disasters that shape people’s everyday ...”

“... is a legal system in tatters.One apparently minor but actually serious event flagged up by SB is Peter Hain’s outing, under the shelter of parliamentary privilege, of Philip Green as the beneficiary of a court order giving temporary anonymity in a current case. MPs and peers – and certainly Lord Hain – know that the ...”

“... eskimo in his igloo, the bedouin in his tent or the Englishman in his semi really lust for deep green marble floors, Tiffany glassware, five-foot-wide walnut staircases, private lifts and faux-Sheraton cabinets that roll back to reveal television screens. But the zest of Wolfe’s depiction of modern times arises in largest part from his endearingly ...”

“... Tynan was the first, and flamboyantly the foremost, of their number. In fact, his father Sir Peter Peacock, chairman of the family chain of Midland drapery stores, could easily have sent him to a public school, and wished to. But his mother, Letitia Rose Tynan, feared that if he left home, he might discover his parents’ guilty secret. She and Sir ...”

“... with painful photographs of urban poverty in Wales, Newcastle, Coatbridge, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, Stepney, Poplar, St Pancras and Durham (there’s not a single photograph of Wigan): to counteract Orwell’s odd views. Before The Road to Wigan Pier was published, Orwell was in Spain, on the second of his journeys of ‘political’ enlightenment. There ...”

“... never solved. One person he particularly impresses is an artist, getting on in years, called Peter Blythe, who was – someone says at a dinner party – ‘pretty famous back in the day’. He is in fact still famous outside the village, busy putting on a new exhibition at a Mayfair gallery, but most locals think him eccentric or ludicrous or dangerous ...”

“... his act may look dull and formulaic: he simply got uppity with a luckless straight man called Peter Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie ...”

“... adviser. On the door hangs a whiteboard declaring: ‘Chemical Threat Medium, Clothing State Green’. I ask Suzanne, a BBC producer, where their security guy gets his information. ‘He reads the papers,’ she says. Britain and America are the two most liberal democracies in the world, the brigadier says, and if they think Saddam … No, here’s ...”

“... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...”

“... it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by hedges and lines of trees and narrow lanes. Farmed fields, in other words. We perceive the countryside as if farmed fields were the default state, as if the two were synonymous. But why should this be true, when so ...”

“... was arrested. A couple of weeks later the conqueror himself arrived. ‘Cyrus entered Babylon, green branches were spread in front of him – peace reigned. Cyrus sent greetings to all Babylon.’ The British Museum also holds Cyrus’ own account of the conquest on the Cyrus Cylinder. There, Nabonidus is accused of being a cruel dictator, of removing gods ...”

“... woman with a position in the world. The hot road spun away behind her; towns rose from the green landscape, crowded close about her with their inn-signs and petrol-pumps, their shops and police and perambulators, then reeled back and were forgotten. June was dying among the roses, the hedges were darkening to a duller ...”

“... in front of the court itself, a timid-looking, hair-waxed gentleman stops for the cameras. It’s Peter Badge, the Chief Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate: the hearing will take place before him, and he will make the decision as to whether there’s a case to be tried or not. He looks like a little chaffinch. ‘Mr Badge,’ we are told later, ‘is ...”