“... 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 ...”

“... Waugh, as his last stories reveal, could not do without his Ambrose Silks and Agatha Runcibles and Peter Pastmasters. But one must not press the analogy too far. Waugh did become interested in himself as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so ...”

“... Street is worth a chapter of sociohistorical analysis of the interwar garçonne: ‘Emma – in green sacque that looks exactly like démodé window-curtain, sandals and varnished toe-nails ... Am struck by presence of many pairs of horn-rimmed spectacles and marked absence of evening dress ... Strange man enters into conversation with me ... (Query: Who ...”

“... Their square shoulders proclaim: Dienst ist Dienst. Worse still:   On the German autobahn, a green road-sign points to Dachau. The name is proclaimed in the largest lettering, as though it were quite normal. Carpenters had recently restored the concentration camp, and surrounding wire and watch-towers, the huts. More than authentic, the place was in ...”

“... their past. Allison points to the environmental planning which has restricted development and, in Peter Hall’s phrase, ‘contained urban England’. Such restriction is in one sense costly – the price of land and population density have been raised – but it was a price well worth paying for the protection of a countryside unsurpassed in the ...”

“... way be about him – which shuffles in on the guest-list a piece, for example, on Lost Highway, Peter Guralnick’s book about country music. Every so often Marcus extends the rubric: ‘Because of Elvis’s arrival, because of who he was and what he became, because of his event and what we made of it, the American past, from the Civil War to the civil ...”

“... political genes of his parents. The ‘Adamses and the Hannaways’, it appears, ‘had emerald green blood running through their veins’: the ‘IRA had been deep in the family’s blood for generations.’ When a British army officer tells the authors that Adams’s father harboured ‘an irrational hatred of the British’ and ‘longed for a reason to ...”

“... of White Hats! The Anti-Flower-in-the-Button-Hole League! The Society for the Abolition of Green-Tea Drinking! The Association for the Restriction of Glove Fastenings to One Button! The Local Option Snuff Confederation!’ – and Durbach is forced to admit that ‘these accusations of eccentricity struck rather close to home.’ But Durbach belongs to ...”

“... this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings ...”

“... later to a belief that it would save trouble if she gave them to the NSPCC, ‘who bring a green bag round every week to collect the waste paper’. But the inevitable gaps in the material do not excuse the fact that the book is so badly edited. The sparse footnotes are whimsical to a degree, telling us that when Fitzgerald mentioned that her ...”

“... lurking sadness in this volume, in spite of its many displays of verbal energy. Both Harrison and Peter Symes, who worked with him on a number of these pieces, insist quite rightly that the films are the thing, the texts ‘a poor substitute’, in Symes’s words, ‘for seeing them and hearing them’. I hate to ask why we could not have the films ...”

“... in 1936 and in May 1937 moved to London, where he was commissioned to write an autobiography, The Green Fool. The book was well received, though a disparaging remark in it caused Oliver St John Gogarty to sue for libel. (Kavanagh had written: ‘I mistook Gogarty’s white-robed maid for his wife – or his mistress. I expected every poet to have a spare ...”

“... of the sporting idea, whether you are doing it with Amaryllis in the shade, or on the village green with your grandchild Wilhelmine. You are disported, carried off out of yourself. In botany, a ‘sport’ is the wayward offshoot of an otherwise predictable shrub. The definition of ‘a real sport’ is a girl like Catherine Morland, the heroine of ...”