“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... George Baroli and I were soaked to the skin. We sat on a wooden bench in the rain, a green bottle of sherry sat between us. George stared straight ahead most of the time, tilting the bottle up to his mouth with both hands, getting it into position, holding it there, and breathing through his nose. I tried to roll him a cigarette inside my jacket while he spoke of Newcastle, of how he thought he’d never leave it, and then telling me stories of his life now, as a beggar in London ...”

“... privilege, the satisfaction and desolation of being included without belonging. Freddie Green, the first-person narrator in the first section of The Sparsholt Affair, differs from his predecessors in not being gay. Even so, he seems a special case of heterosexual for 1940. He describes his fellow undergraduates’ assessment of a young man, ‘a ...”

“... Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on the Oval Office carpet, and complied. Klaus Barbie was plucked from the SS ‘Most Wanted’ list and, with many of his confrères, given a second career in American ...”

“... that could be illustrations for an 18th-century georgic poem on the subject. At Englefield Green near Egham, where his son had a villa, he made landscapes of the family amusing themselves in their garden and entertaining their guests, in idealised images of Georgian middle-class domesticity and sociability. Many of these images are much more complex ...”

“... or Young Girls Dancing (as Clark prefers to call it), of 1925. Art historians like Christopher Green have tried to distance Picasso from the rightist nexus of Mediterraneanism by pointing out that he embraced the primitive in a way that would have been anathema to George and other advocates of Latinity. But the Mediterranean had its own primitive side. It ...”

“... book?’). Chris tries her best with Charlotte Stant and Maggie Verver, but chirruping about Henry James novels isn’t really what she’s all about. ‘The Dumb Cunt’ is more her style, ‘a factory of emotions’; her passion has sent her back into adolescence, ‘hunched up in a leather jacket’, listening to the Ramones. She’s creeped out ...”

“... these are as marvellously implausible as, for example, the expression ‘in fine’ – perhaps Henry James might be a candidate if we accepted that criterion. F. Bastian, in his book on Defoe’s early life, makes attributions on the basis of (inter alia) certain ‘Defoisms’ which turn out to include tags such as hinc illae lachrymae. Such items of ...”

“... against the barbarities of Zhdanov but equally to be wielded against Hollywood, advertising and Henry Luce. Even the post-war Partisan Review symposium ‘Our Country and Our Culture’, which in 1952 elected to celebrate, as the use of the possessive might indicate, a more rounded and reconciled view of America on the part of the intellectuals, was shot ...”

“... 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 ...”