“... to his employer’s top secrets, Magnus has another box with him. This is his father’s old green filing-cabinet, which at last he has prised open. Rick Pym was, like Cornwell’s father, a confidence man whose frauds took him to prison. Nevertheless he brought Magnus up a proper English gentleman, paying for public school and Oxford with bouncing ...”

“... and humbugs of travel, or pretended travel. The best-known is Louis de Rougemont, alias Henry Green, who fooled the Wide World magazine in 1898 with his nonsense about cannibals in Australia. In much the same class was his contemporary, A. Henry Savage Landor, grandson of the poet. As a boy he half-hanged himself, which, as Keay remarks, was excellent ...”

“... Association, has some plums. Of especial unforgettableness are a burst of rage from Martin Green against ‘charm’ as imbuing the Peter Pans of Barrie and of Disney; a vindication of Amy March as holding the right attitudes to art and to life – this by Anne Hollander; by Ronald Berman a perfectly ridiculous ...”

“... not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on exposure to their work in a new medium the viewer, reader or listener can’t help assessing the extent to which their style and methodology has been directly transposed. Cronenberg seems to ...”

“... in the Boston Public Garden: She entered with a black coat and black jacket and a diamondy green dress. The cloak came off, then after slight hesitation the jacket, then another pause and the cloak went on again. She had her audience. Each obstruction fell into her hands: a whistle from the amplifier (‘I see I have a rival’), trucks rumbling down ...”

“... of concrete detail, often signalled by parentheses and the rule of three: ‘festive pastels (mint green, rancho pink, milky desert blue)’, ‘prescription medications (Roitman, Andrea, alprazolam .25 mg)’. And there’s the odd misfiring poeticism (‘Light from the street flew in black bands across the floor’). Yet a lot of the writing is formidably ...”

“... I accepted it … I walked the Paris streets under the rainbow glory of the lamps, walked on night-green grass and over pavements shining like diamonds.’ This is from The Philistines (1949): ‘She shivered a little in the chilly young air of the day … All sensation was beautiful, even to the movement of a finger, the flutter of a lash … Having doubted ...”

“... had worked earlier, Pevsner contributed a series called ‘Treasure Hunt’ under the pseudonym Peter F.R. Donner (in theory, to disguise how much of every issue he was writing himself). Still very much the architectural historian, with his references to the style of decorative motifs and examination of plan types, he turned his attention to everyday ...”

“... Oswald Mosley (whom she always called TPOL, The Poor Old Leader) in her early novel Wigs on the Green. ‘I don’t quite know what an Aryan is.’ ‘Well, it’s quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes.’ Mosley banned her from his home ...”

“... readers and intellectual explorers that many of us grew up with, South Pacific cousin to Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and innumerable similar childhood favourites: this is the last place one would expect to encounter a jealous quarrel about the nature of referentiality. On the actual island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, blockaded during a ...”

“... a red rose, how do you know it’s really red, and why might we think that blue is closer to green than red? ‘Say what you really think,’ he told his students, and ‘don’t try to be intelligent.’ The classes often ‘felt like the day of judgment’, as one awestruck participant put it, but they continued successfully year after year. Broad had ...”

“... Mayne: scorched curtains, three-legged prams, free-range, snot-rich urchins and, as the architect Peter Barber recalled with nostalgie de la boue, ‘an elderly woman who used to stand at her gate all day long and everybody knew what was going on on the street because she was a kind of conduit’.It isn’t surprising that it took time to catch on. It ...”

“... school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... is a derivative literariness that projects its own tittering onto the subject: the giggling, gray-green roar that fills a gorge (sweet Thames! run softly) old books refer to as the   vale of Tempe ... Eliotic echoes of that calibre belong (sec above) to journalism. For all her reputation as a poet, Clampitt frequently seems ripe for the travel pages of ...”