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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tourists love, just as there’s a head of Joyce, which no one much looks at, in St Stephen’s Green. When Nora stood Joyce up on 14 June, he wrote to her ardently, demanding another date. They met on 16 June, which is when their story began, and when Ulysses both began and ended. Lucky it wasn’t on Good Friday, when the pubs are closed. I wonder if the ...”

“... of Genesis, eventually settling on ‘two methods which can paint the living world’: Hershey Green, his adolescent avatar, who suffers the humiliation of being named after a chocolate bar, would narrate his family history in what Schwartz called ‘biblical prose’, while a chorus of unnamed ghosts would respond to each episode in blank verse.Laughlin ...”

“... the year Clarke returned to Ireland, a book called Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, by Sir Robert Anderson, a police commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was ...”

“... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...”

“... Messiaen’s goal, exactly: he wrote music to praise God, not to proselytise. Nonetheless, as Robert Sholl argues in his ‘critical biography’, it’s not easy to disentangle Messiaen’s art from his belief that in composing he was ‘making a transcendent God empirical and sensate’. The music, Sholl suggests, allows ‘believers and non-believers ...”

“... accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides’ – the high green meadows and the blue-green bellies of the flies. Plath’s poem, like a superior terror movie, pointed all its verbal skills towards panic and emptiness, but what endures today is the art-work, the blackberries themselves ...”