“... wore black (1967), Stolen Kisses (1968), The Wild Child (1969), The Story of Adèle H (1975), The Green Room (1978), Finally Sunday (1983). The Letters begin in 1945 and continue to the year of Truffaut’s death. He has some regular correspondents and confidants – Robert Lachenay, his school friend, Helen Scott, who ...”

“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”

“... curious about how we got where we are. It could also save the Government the expense of another Green Paper – although it is unlikely that they will find Halsey’s analysis congenial. Anyone reading him must be sceptical about the current round of reforms, based as they are on blind faith in the virtues of homogenisation and command decision. As a first ...”

“... year or two of the originals. Already, too, there is no question of comparable English authors – Robert May, William Rabisha – being translated in the reverse direction. Yet at this period the connections between cookery and other arts and crafts could still be noticed without undue self-consciousness. Pepys and Evelyn may well have discussed with each ...”

“... such remarkable properties as that of spin without mass, how can it also be really composed of green grass and round tables? Five of the 12 essayists – Michael Dummett, P.F. Strawson, David Pears, D.M. Armstrong and Charles Taylor – are concerned with these or with closely related questions. Collectively – taken together with those earlier writings ...”

“... be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne ...”

“... the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and ...”

“... Living Mountain, in an edition called The Grampian Quartet. But it took the apostolic arrival of Robert Macfarlane, who proclaimed her works in The Old Ways and in an introduction to the 2011 edition of The Living Mountain, to turn Shepherd into a publishing sensation. It’s a chippy Aberdonian thing to say, but I notice that this validation had to come ...”

“... of what looks like a lava-flow, a bubbling eruption of red and yellow on a background of blue and green). The great roar and hiss of publicity surrounding the book will soon subside – sufficient unto the day the newspaper thereof. But the shockwaves emanating from the poems themselves will be felt for some time. The poems in Birthday Letters are ostensibly ...”

“... prettiness has arrived. You would not have guessed it was on the way. In a picture from 1951 blue-green appears (coral reds and pale blue-greens were colours Chardin accented pictures with); and in a frieze-like arrangement including two bowls, from 1953-54, highlights suggest that a duster has got to work and a little more light is being allowed in. Over the ...”

“... can, it seems, make excellent translations on any principle at all, free or literal or in between. Robert Lowell was cruelly and unjustly pilloried by Nabokov for his wonderful ‘imitations’ of Rimbaud, Rilke and others. But then Nabokov’s literal version of Eugene Onegin has all kinds of virtues, and is itself routinely pilloried by almost everyone who ...”

“... bagpipes reminds me of the first cricket matches I watched from the Victorian pavilion in the lush green field of the Lawrence Gardens (now the Jinnah Gardens), where Majid Khan’s father (and Imran Khan’s uncle), the stern-faced Dr Jehangir Khan, used to open the innings, and where, in a crucial Test Match between India and Pakistan in the Fifties, our ...”

“... introducing one of the toughest vaccine passport regimes in response to Covid: a ‘super green’ pass, signalling double vaccination, is required in most public places. People aged over fifty have to be fully vaccinated in order to work, as do most government employees.One success of the anti-vax movement is that we now spend so much time talking ...”

“... Barrie, nor the small-town gothic that reacted to it, in George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901) or John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914). Kinraddie, ‘the new minister’ proclaims at the end of the prelude to Sunset Song, ‘was the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny briar bush in the lee of a house ...”

“... link. An orange shag carpet covered the floorboards. I offered him $1200 cash. He handed over a green plastic keychain that read ‘Laugh, live, love and be happy!’ and warned: ‘Don’t take it over 45 or it’ll throw a rod.’ A friend later explained: ‘That’s a polite way of saying the engine will explode.’ Having to drive slow, pleasingly to ...”