“... to the Bard in Westminster Abbey as a way of advertising their superior patriotism. The actor David Garrick also used the Bard to inflate and dignify his own career, puffing him as the nation’s number-one playwright – just like Lawrence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh would go on to do – as a means of representing himself as its number-one actor. He had ...”

“... I was ushered in to Colonel Klindt’s office. ‘I have come to request a visit to my husband, David Kitson,’ I said. ‘No visits for Kitson.’ He did not even look up. ‘Look –’ ‘It’s no good being difficult, lady,’ he said. ‘No visits for Kitson and that’s it. If you want to apply again tomorrow, well, that’s your affair. You can ...”

“... their stocks of ideas too rapidly. ‘Our problem is that we never wanted to repeat,’ says David Thomas, singer with the early American post-punk group Pere Ubu. ‘That desire … became as much of a trap as trying to repeat formulas the way some bands do.’ Yet Reynolds is too busy working through all his overlapping band biographies to pursue this ...”

“... up, is workmanlike. There are nice bits, though. Even near the most troubled estates, there is green stuff. Even near Chickenley, where the 12-year-old girl tried to hang a five-year-old boy in a patch of woods. Many people in Dewsbury think the media overdid it. ‘The press wanted to make it another James Bulger,’ a police officer tells me. The CPS ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... that there would be more than a frank exchange of ideas when Mailer head-butted Vidal in the green room and Vidal punched him in the stomach. It was rumoured at the time that Vidal had recently had a facelift which Mailer’s head-conk threatened to undo. Lesser men would have fled, but as Vidal is fond of saying, there are two things to which one always ...”

“... it once more. But he found himself drawn to the supposedly obsolete social liberalism of T.H. Green, which he associated with Ruskinian political radicalism in its idealisation of active ‘citizenship’ within a comprehensively caring State, and he had the nerve to suspect that there was more life in the old Idealist corpse than in all its ...”

“... has spruced up with pools, trees and terraces. You turn again – suspended above you now is a green helicopter from the Architecture and Design Department – and climb to a great atrium, 110 feet high, punctuated by the huge Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman in the centre (it looks like a rusty exclamation point from God) and a panoramic Water Lilies by ...”

“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... crisis had never gone away; memories of the disorder of the Civil War and Interregnum were still green. Peers and Commons were united in their struggle to exclude a Catholic heir to the throne, while the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous ...”

“... and his party leave. 28 March. I go up the street to Sesame, the organic shop, slipping on a green corduroy jacket. I’m also wearing an old pair of green corduroy trousers so it looks like a suit. It makes me remember how Gielgud used to be excited – or pretended to be – by corduroy. ‘Corduroy! My dear!’ And ...”

“... along there,’ the kind of colloquialism you’d hear on the street or in Dixon of Dock Green; the Latin teacher crossed it out and suggested ‘Vacate the thoroughfare’ instead. Harrison had his revenge on him – and on everyone else for whom the word ‘Classics’ was and is synonymous with ‘posh’ – when he translated Palladas some years ...”

“... world in which they find themselves. In The Word for World is Forest (1972), Le Guin’s little green men are not the ray-gun-toting hooligans of bad sci-fi comics but undersized furry dreamers, who (in an overt allegory of the Vietnam War) are taught how to kill by gun-toting humans, who want to deforest the ...”

“... and provide the skills base needed by modern industry and commerce.’ To say nothing of Sir David Philips, Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, who remarked in 1988 that ‘decisions by the Government were “progressively leading to an unstable situation”.’ Fighting words, no doubt, but they have the unmistakably musty smell of ...”

“... and fogged blues and, in the right season, the stark beauty of the Arctic poppy, a slender grey-green plant with pale yellow, near translucent flowers that turn constantly to face the sun through its daylong journey around the summer sky. Elsewhere, there are gentians and tiny saxifrages, too small to see until the eye learns this northern light well enough ...”