“... 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 ...”

“... Her two previous books – both novels – gave voice to traditionally voiceless characters. In Green Girl, to an ordinary shop girl, her inner life a mystery because she is young and female and no one is interested in what she thinks. She cannot sort out her life, has no external referents. In O Fallen Angel the characters include a ‘good’ Midwestern ...”

“... wrong at the right time. An icon of the soixante-huitards, Castoriadis collaborated with the now Green Danny Cohn-Bendit on From Ecology to Autonomy. Five volumes of his writings were published under the umbrella title, Les Carrefours du labyrinthe, the last, Fait et à faire, last February. This was soon followed by The Castoriadis Reader, edited by ...”

“... of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional history, provides the theme for David Runciman’s modestly titled but far-reaching book. Runciman’s study deals not with pluralism in its current, largely sociological, sense of ethnic, cultural, sexual and lifestyle diversity, but with pluralism in its early 20th-century political sense ...”

“... and an eagerly embraced opportunity for the people who’ve written books on the phenomenon. Like David Kalat’s A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series (1997) and Steve Ryfle’s feebly named Japan’s Favourite Mon-Star (1998), William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind profits from the haziness of most people’s recollections by ...”

“... crews were dogged by superstitious prohibitions; no woman was let on board, and the colour green was taboo, as was any mention or depiction of pigs, or rabbits. The taboos were commensurate with the danger. Hardie’s other grandfather died in a U-boat attack in 1939. In 1998 Hardie lost a boat in a freak sea, though he and his crew were rescued. Off ...”

“... as a monochrome bird is myopic; as Wires points out, its black feathers have hints of blue, green and copper. It’s possible that the birds, which can probably detect the ultraviolet spectrum, see something very different when they look at one another. Wires may be right to invoke the biblical notion of uncleanness, though not for the reason she ...”

“... into which the Medusa was sailing were ominously warm. The captain did not take note. The sea went green, and crew members worried. The captain did not. Sand scrolled in the waves. Floating cities of kelp appeared: trouble, crew members knew. The sea went clear: they were screwed. The Medusa ran aground on the treacherous Arguin Bank. Chaos ensued. The captain ...”

“... and, nearby, in the middle of an estate of executive period homes with three-SUV garages, a vast green pantiled Chinese fantasy which houses the Hongxin Oriental Buffet – all you can eat for £12. It’s a more raucous performance than I.M. Pei’s arty pavilion for the Keswick family at Oare, south of Marlborough. There are commendable extensions to the ...”

“... and folk tales are clumsy and blundering and foolish, and their strength doesn’t always prevail: David fells Goliath with a slingshot (like a child in a bombsite playground), and poor boy Jack can outwit the ogre at the top of the beanstalk, however big and strong and vicious and rich he is, and make off with the golden goose. Such stories are popular ...”

“... did not edit the Bannatyne Manuscript. It was edited by his colleague in the Court of Session, Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, whose Annals led Sir Walter Scott to laud him as ‘the restorer of Scottish history’. Does it matter that the notorious cry of ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ greeted Home’s tragedy in London, not Edinburgh? It ...”

“... like ‘the rummage/and shuck of the waves’; ‘The nubbed leaves/come away/in a tease of green.’ Robertson is fond of describing actions with paired verbs – rabbits ‘scud and veer’, flags ‘flare and gutter’ and tumblers ‘flip and flex’. He regards Nature as a repository of lost personalities – the wind is a lost voice, the sea is a ...”

“... Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about exiled people: characters in ...”