“... was trying to bury the case, Marina Litvinenko pushed for an inquest into her husband’s murder. Robert Owen, a High Court judge, promised an ‘open and fearless’ investigation. In 2013 the foreign secretary, William Hague, made an application for ‘public interest immunity’ – which meant that the government’s classified files on Litvinenko ...”

“... competitive tendering has effectively been suspended as departments have been given the green light to make ‘direct awards’ to firms; there is little, if any, accountability about the way these decisions are made. In late March, the Cabinet Office called in the accountants Deloitte to run a crisis unit to source PPE. The result was centralised ...”

“... provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter’s national security ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... change the nature of the regime? Either way, the true nature of the protests is being missed. The green colours adopted by the Mousavi supporters and the cries of ‘Allahu akbar!’ that resonated from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness suggested that the protesters saw themselves as returning to the roots of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, 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 ...”

“... Happy Moscow, was never published in his lifetime, though it now has a fine English translation by Robert Chandler. The eponymous Moscow is a woman, not the city, though she floats around it doing some characteristic 1930s-Moscow things like parachute jumping (insouciantly lighting a cigarette in mid-flight) as well as having various dead-end love affairs in a ...”

“... oxides, producing its distinctive colours: alongside various shades of blue, there was sage green, lilac and chocolate brown, all as matte, smooth and tactile as fondant icing. As well as vases of every shape and size, Wedgwood produced portrait medallions and chimneypiece tablets, buttons and buckles, teapots, inkwells, boxes and even chess sets in ...”

“... to take a look at was panting, at ease, unprimed, on the flags of the canal bank in Bethnal Green. His opo had interested himself in what was going on across the water. The man had a razor-shaved skull and small flushed ears, mutilated by circles of gold, disappearing into the only fat on his steriod-abused body armour. The pit bull was a statue, with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... verse. The treatise applies to Persian literature the sublime aesthetics of the Oxford Orientalist Robert Lowth, for whom the terse passion of ancient Hebrew poetry (Job and Psalms especially) had expressive powers unmatched by the regulated, decorous traditions of classical verse. Generous illustrations from the 14th-century poet Hāfiz decorated the work ...”