“... as Gide liked to say, and we may have to raise some questions when someone like Henry James comes along and offers to codify its new ‘laws’ in doctrines like ‘point of view’. Even though he is virtually absent from this book, for reasons I will come to, Faulkner offered his own useful tripartite formula for what the novelist’s ...”

“... wide/Gone forth, whom now strange meeting did befall/In a strange land.’ Owen’s copy of Henry Cary’s translation of the Divine Comedy indicates that he had read at least cantos X to XV of the Inferno, and it was surely the Dantesque aspects of ‘Strange Meeting’ that drew a belated compliment from T.S. Eliot, who in 1964 described it as ‘not ...”

“... To begin with, you needed to know a shearling from a gimmer lamb, or hire someone who did. In 1611 Henry Bankes employed two shepherds, Durington and Blackwell, to value some lambs in Yorkshire; it turned out he was overpaying by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of ...”

“... is changed to various colours. They imitate thus, among other things, bunches of grapes with green tendrils.’ Tennyson’s passion for accuracy of detail is alive even in his excesses and absurdities: the description of a steamboat which he dropped from both ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ and ‘Audley Court’, ‘The snoring funnel whizzed with ...”

“... Yvonne Hegoburu tends the six-and-a-half hectares of her Domaine de Souch according to the Green principles of ‘biodynamie’ and as a homage to her dead husband; in Sardinia, Battista Columbu reckons that he has an ‘ethical commitment’ to continue producing his tiny quantities of unique Malvasia; and in Argentina, an indigenous farmer’s single ...”

“... sovereignty was respected by the victorious powers, particularly Japan, which, in a campaign green-lighted by Britain during the war, had seized German-held territory in the Shandong peninsula. Asians and Africans accustomed to stonewalling colonial officials were naturally attracted to the generous promises of the American president. But Wilson, a ...”

“... have seen a succession of David Attenborough hits: Blue Planet II, Dynasties and Dynasties II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II on the BBC; and on Netflix, Our Planet, A Life on Our Planet and Planet Earth II. Attenborough’s most recent series, Wild Isles, was watched by more than ten million people in the first month of its release. Blue Planet III and ...”

“... the Greek nation. The Olympic Park was sited on a significant patch of ground: the memory field of Henry Miller’s fine but undervalued travel journal, The Colossus of Maroussi. It was written in the shadow of war and published in 1941. It was the first Miller title that Penguin felt brave enough to place on their list. Apart from some nude sunbathing with ...”

“... and liked to dine with cats, whose paws he licked clean. Silberman includes a chapter about Henry Cavendish, a pathologically shy scientific polymath whose many breakthroughs include the 1766 discovery of hydrogen; ‘The way to talk to Cavendish is never to look at him,’ the astronomer Francis Wollaston was to say of him. Both books also rightly flay ...”

“... listeners falling downstairs and jumping out of windows in an effort to escape the little green men. The newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, calling for more government regulation of radio, much as they do now for television. When the Mercury Theatre’s Danton’s Death opened to mixed reviews the following week, they were quick to pounce. ‘For the ...”

“... by poor Shawn O’Soolavawin. A genius with the crayon. A muff with a brush. My most prized Paul Henry. His good period. Before he sank Paris into the bogs of Achill. Now! Here is a truly rare piece! An Augustus John sketch I picked up in a pub in the West of Ireland.’ (From Lennox, ‘A truly rare piece by Mossy O’B.’) ‘And right there, in the ...”

“... Fitch to equip themselves for life in the tropics. Some zealous young Republicans in Baghdad’s Green Zone were busy dismantling the Iraqi state, but they clearly did not impress Ferguson. ‘America’s brightest and best,’ he complained, ‘aspire not to govern Mesopotamia but to manage MTV; not to rule the Hejaz but to run a hedge fund.’ ‘If one ...”

“... of Europe’. Ventriloquism remained a favourite theme for hyperbole throughout the 19th century. Henry Cockton’s novel The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist, first serialised in the 1830s and still in print when Queen Victoria died, popularised the implausible idea that ventriloquists can ‘throw’ their voices like squibs and leave ...”

“... parlance, ‘parasite singles’. One result of this informal matrimonial strike is that new, green-field household formation, once the motor of Japanese domestic demand, has practically ceased. Living together, the all but universal prelude to parenthood in the West, has yet to reach high-rent, socially prudish Japan, as the low-to-vanishing illegitimacy ...”

“... about the risks of foul water, but new concepts reinforced old sensibilities. In the 1780s, Thomas Henry, an English medic, wrote that ‘the drinking of putrid water is not only highly disagreeable and disgusting, but extremely noxious to the constitution.’ From the early 19th century, both private and governmental action was taken to make municipal ...”