“... of that old nightmare that Californians are wasting the last drops of water by keeping bright green lawns and turquoise pools. Far more water goes on agriculture than on residential use – and, despite intermittent droughts, the Sierra and the Rockies have enough snow water to keep the whole thing going. Indefinitely? We don’t know. But who knows those ...”

“... back in the 1920s on the morning of her party, Clarissa Dalloway is mending a tear in her green dress. It is a favourite dress. It would be anyone’s favourite dress because it is both distinctive and yet suitable: it is one of the ‘little out of the way things’ that Mrs Dalloway’s dressmaker, Sally Parker, could create and yet at the same time ...”

“... difficulty, but he did not fully resolve it, even implicitly. Roughly, I know what ‘That tree is green’ means by knowing, among other things, what ‘is green’ means; but my knowledge of what ‘is green’ means consists in my knowing what it means to say, of any specific ...”

“... The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has ...”

“... liberal internationalism’ have come from an older cadre of conservatives. John Mearsheimer and David Hendrickson are both outcasts from the American right, both teach political science in the Midwest and both have opposed every US military intervention since the end of the Cold War. They believe that the US ought to have emerged from it as a chastened ...”

“... most origin stories, this one is too telling to be entirely true; it has a frisson, as the critic David Sylvester put it, ‘at once Oedipal and necrophilic’. Although Magritte wasn’t present at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a recurrent avatar of the artist, stands by a ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... a welcome end to their journey. ‘There was great joy to see the land,’ the Baptist preacher David George recalled. ‘The high mountain, at some distance . . . appeared like a cloud to us.’ They had retched and ached through seven weeks of storms and pernicious fevers at sea. Now they raised three cheers and fired a salute. Their British officers ...”

“... back in 1959 and first published in 1980. A comparison between the two books, Vasily’s and David’s, does not do the later one much good. As an outpouring of feeling, and as a series of sombre representations of the condition of modern Israel, To the End of the Land is often impressive, sometimes touching. As a novel it simply does not come off. This ...”

“... of your actions.’ Against the grey sky and the mud, the Jungle is a colourful mess of red and green and blue tents, and tiny shacks draped with blue polypropylene tarps, everything snapping and shivering in the wind. Some of the shelters seem professionally constructed, with plywood flooring and right-angled walls of well-planed lumber. Others are ...”

“... a Brecht musical’. Maturity is less glossy: he arrived at rehearsals for The Hard Problem in a green tweed jacket and orange socks.Stoppard has talked of putting on Englishness ‘like a coat’ when he arrived as an eight-year-old. A more sentimental biographer might have colluded in the suggestion that the coat could be shrugged off: that only underneath ...”

“... night on stage. Here is Reeves entangled with various young women; here he is falling in love with David Diamond, a composer who was a shadow figure in their marriage. I am thinking of a place called 7 Middagh Street, a fairytale brownstone in Brooklyn Heights whose back windows looked out onto New York Harbour and the Brooklyn Bridge. It was demolished in ...”

“... maintained’. The implication is that a real picture of the author, like the one on the front of David Cecil’s study, would not do justice to the image that Tanner has formed of her, the geist that he requires. If we have Mrs Abington in place of Jane Austen, why not a Stendhal heroine instead of Elizabeth Bennet, so that ‘by showing the different ways ...”

“... records in all. County lists and herbarium sheets were searched for older records. One lesson of David Elliston Allen’s earlier book The Naturalist in Britain was that this kind of disciplined collaboration can get good scientific work out of the essentially inefficient engine of amateur natural history. There is more than one reason for climbing such ...”