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“... scandals when women were disfigured by often lead-based face powders. It was only in 1866 that Henry Tetlow of Philadelphia discovered that zinc oxide made a non-toxic face powder and only in 1873 that the first lead-free make-up for stage actors was created, by the German opera singer and chemist Ludwig Leichner. In 1911, Grumme, a Swedish soap ...”

“... discusses are Hever Castle in Kent, the home of Anne Boleyn, which was done up by the Astors, and Henry VIII’s Eltham Palace, which acquired a dazzling if slightly incongruous extension in the Moderne style for the Courtaulds. Estate agents were not slow to take note of the historical wow factor and Tinniswood notes that extensive as Elizabeth I’s ...”

“... of the Victorian civic spirit were progressively undermined by a string of outwardly innocuous green suburbs.’ To prove this, compression, elision and some fancy footwork are needed. Hunt’s difficulty with London is that it was sorting out its governance and its crushing social problems at the same time as it started decanting its population. To ...”

“... crisis had never gone away; memories of the disorder of the Civil War and Interregnum were still green. Peers and Commons were united in their struggle to exclude a Catholic heir to the throne, while the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous ...”

“... shelf, or cupboard-top, of books: Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, Junkie, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Lolita, books which I had lovingly collected from jumble sales and Oxfam shops, and which I now had a strong sense were somehow ‘wrong’. We’d done ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ for O-level English, so that stayed. Nineteen Eighty-Four was ...”

“... playmates and arrange a proper reunion. Having put Rabbit Angstrom to rest and closed the book on Henry Bech, Updike understands the formalities of reintroducing characters who have been kept in storage. It’s been more than two decades since the original novel and the mental picture of its warlock and witches was colonised by the movie version, remembered ...”

“... lying in wait For what I should, yet never can, remember: No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside, Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. (‘Old Man’) It is odd, as John Bayley noted in an essay two decades ago, how frequently the poetry conveys ...”

“... time for dinner. ‘We can just have something quick, don’t you know. Maybe cold meat and a nice green salad and a tomato aspic that you can prepare in the morning, before you leave?’‘So, what do you conclude?’ This was a question Segal’s friend Vivian Gornick would often ask and to which she would reply: ‘I’m not in the concluding ...”

“... is not only a composite of three much older nations, but also fractured throughout by regionalism. Henry James is quoted to the effect that Warwickshire ‘is the core and centre of the English world ... unmitigated England’. Conversely, the gardens of Wallington in far Northumberland are Scottish in style. And Blickling in Norfolk is as culturally and ...”

“... that last line, ‘The leaves should be lush and the petals frail’ (or, more literally, ‘The green should be stronger and the red weaker’), is usually interpreted as symbolising a man, who supposedly gains strength, and a woman, who supposedly loses it, after they have made love. The other poem in the same ci form is by a man, the ...”

“... Books, a gay publishing house that received funding from the GLC and was based on Clerkenwell Green, near where I lived. She poured a lot of energy into the job. She was efficient and didn’t mind hard work. She was helpful. When the two men who ran the press, Roy Trevelion and Tenebris Light, went on holiday to Gran Canaria, she willingly redecorated ...”

“... ideal situation, with the lavender bank just coming into bloom and the trees and grass fresh and green after a week or two of rain. It’s one of the perfect places of the earth, utterly silent and private, the twitter of a hawk the only sound. And it’s the last time we shall be able to come. It’s a warm afternoon and with no one around I swim dutifully ...”

“... it with a new legal category of irrebuttable adjudicative error. This is a step beyond the ‘Henry VIII’ clauses by which Parliament has over many years devolved to ministers the power to amend primary legislation, and which a former Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, earlier this century characterised as the use of a dispensing power familiar to the Stuart ...”

“... the woman he has come to kill as no better than ‘a salvatory’ (or ointment box) filled with ‘green mummy’ – as though, like the corpses of condemned criminals, hers would soon be made available as a source of balm. Editors’ notes to these passages seldom offer any more elaborate gloss than ‘medicine made from corpses’, as though this were ...”

“... or the lives they lived and the causes they espoused. The three of these who stand out most are Henry Morton Stanley, who explored the route, the novelist Joseph Conrad, and the Irish patriot and human rights activist Roger Casement. It was Casement and a Frenchman living in England, E.D. Morel, who first drew attention to the crimes committed in the Congo ...”