“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... outward glance that we are likewise her subjects. Their fluctuating satins, the swags of laurel-green curtain behind them and the late June evening clouds all rise and fall to an inner rhythm that is unmistakeably amorous. To view this painting is to get tossed up in that convulsion, but it’s also to recognise that its wellsprings do not belong to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... None of my sons came to her funeral … I remembered the English countryside, the gardens, the green lawns where I spent the long months of captivity, the weedy rivers and the trees she loved so much. And a great desire came over me to come back here to my wife’s country. And this, sir, is the truth.The same concern with national and cultural identity is ...”

“... political discourse could be challenged and altered. In 1999 Brown was furious with the journalist Robert Peston for describing that year’s Budget as ‘seriously redistributive’ in the Financial Times. ‘Why did you write that?’ he asked Peston. ‘It was profoundly unhelpful.’ This anxious refusal to make the case for a more equal country meant that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 20th-century spying, The Second Oldest Profession:* He wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote only in green ink, and, after he lost his leg in an accident, used to get around the corridors by putting his wooden one on a child’s scooter and propelling himself vigorously with the other. Visitors were intimidated by his habit of stabbing the wooden leg with his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is no coincidence that travel writers on Central Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier travels. His interest in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Times Square, the jazz and dance routines of brownstone Harlem (‘Harlem is like Walham green gone crazy’) and the joys of breakfast at the Arabian Nights Luncheonette (‘the food is delish 40000000 tons of hot dogs and hamburgers must be consumed in NY daily’). Four years later he and the Aikens went to Mexico and stayed for a while with ...”

“... was variation in colour. Chemical compounds containing strontium burn red; copper carbonate adds green; iron filings make showers of golden sparkles.China’s appetite for novelty also led to chains of multiple ignitions and wooden dragons spitting fire. The 16th-century scholar Feng Ying Ching wrote about a kind of bomb from which sprang ground rats and ...”