“... world in itself, with its own architectural traditions’. Brindle writes evocatively about this green landscape studded with tower houses, built to be defensive but elegant, their limewashed tapering outlines quite unlike the forbidding grey ruins that most have become. How comfortable and welcoming they were is apparent in the account of a 17th-century ...”

“... wish to remove their more flagrant tattoos, Nabokov did not want Lolita to remain for ever in the green livery of the Olympia Press. At some point in most reading you must stop noticing the printed page if you are to attend fully to the words on it. The thing about most private press books was not that they were read differently, but that they were not read ...”

“... not self-conscious. His interest in the naked as a subject in art is, of course, related to this. Robert Hughes, in the passionate and polemical introduction to the catalogue of the London exhibition, quotes Degas, as reported by George Moore, on the subject of his female nudes: ‘I show them deprived of their airs and graces, reduced to the level of animals ...”

“... dogmatic and, above all, less Anglo-centric; greener here, indeed, than in his previous book, The Green Flag. It is not simply that he adds an Irish dimension to the Gaelic era, to the process of assimilation of the Normans and their new technology, and to the subsequent Anglo-Irish culture, but that he exposes narrow attitudes towards the ‘degenerate ...”

“... finds no place in syllabuses which find room for, say, Vonnegut or Doris Lessing. Since Henry Green, arguably the best English novelist of his time, is little better off, we need not waste our time being surprised at this neglect. It would be agreeable to believe that the present stir of interest might alter the situation: but the rather freakish God’s ...”

“... the performance of the American economy continues to make those on this side of the Atlantic turn green with envy. Small wonder, then, that the Chancellor has back-pedalled. In his Mansion House speech this autumn he effectively abandoned the sterling M3 target which had been the central indicator of monetary policy since the Thatcher Administration came to ...”

“... drew a decidedly crisp letter from Lady Mosley, who called it ‘fanciful in the extreme’. As Robert Skidelsky said of the meeting in his Oswald Moslev: ‘The number of future memoir writers and Labour politicians in the audience alone ensured that it would be talked about for years to come.’ There were also a hundred angry busmen present, out for ...”

“... figure.’ The next day he settles on a shepherd plaid shawl (rather than on the large blue and green plaid in the sketch) for the woman. On the 24th he spends two hours dressing up the lay figure of the man, and on the 30th he is working on the ‘coat of the Emigrant from the one I made on purpose two winters ago at Hampstead & have [never] worn since ...”

“... been the family schoolroom; in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus one September afternoon they found the green gate that led into the garden of the last house in which they had lived on their way out of Russia – the house still there but with several others crammed into the space around it. These visits elicited a more obvious emotional response, but they feature ...”

“... 14th century; the Van Eycks had forebears and colleagues involved in this production line, such as Robert Campin, who also embraced oil paint. Captivated by pictorial exports from Siena, Flemings were now keen to commission works that stood halfway between the public arrays of stone-carved saints and the little pictures in books meant for private enjoyment ...”

“... that his time was up. Johnson, who had made his peace with Ecomog after abandoning Taylor, got the green light from Nigeria to get rid of Doe and give Liberia a fresh start. Or so the Nigerians hoped.Doe’s death quickly became a scandal. Some of the murder scenes are available on YouTube. Drinking Budweiser and slapping his open palm on the table while a ...”

“... Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style ...”

“... or desire. There are few scenes more melancholy in 19th-century fiction, or in paintings such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home, than the enforced sale of household goods. Thackeray made a specialism of clearance, in Vanity Fair and then again in The Newcomes; George Eliot followed suit, at length, in The Mill on the ...”

“... carefully – at every volume on the shelves. I ended up with three paperbacks: the Greek Myths by Robert Graves, Volumes I and II, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. This is a commonplace book written by a woman at the tenth-century court of the Heian dynasty in Japan. I thought it was wonderful. I read it countless times. I was entranced by the beauty and ...”

“... put their crosses just where they were going to put them anyway. But some recent research by Robert Goodin and James Mahmud Rice suggests that something more complicated might be going on.* The polls, they reveal, don’t fluctuate in the run-up to an election because respondents are simply humouring the pollsters with the pretence that their opinions ...”