“... 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 ...”

“... Now that Updike’s an elder statesman in the world of letters, an elfin figure pared down to a David Levine caricature of himself, a newer generation of detractors (replacing the ones that died off) has reserved him a room at the retirement home and seems irritated that he won’t take the hint. In recent interviews and articles he acknowledges the testy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... treatment,’ James Callaghan stated as home secretary, going on to declare that, enhanced by open green spaces and communal living units as well as new medical and psychiatric facilities, Holloway would become ‘basically a secure hospital’ at the ‘hub of the female penal system’. The reconstruction took place with the prison inmates in situ at a cost ...”

“... but now he met the youngest, 15-year-old Noel – he helped her pick up the fragments of the small green coffee cup she’d dropped. He would spend the next two years hatching schemes that would allow them to meet, most of them thwarted, by the fact that she was still at Bedales, by her protective older sisters, or by Noel herself, who held him at arm’s ...”

“... and backs of bystanders. At the north end, near the traditionally less tolerant area of Bethnal Green, National Front members sold their papers on market days and congregated at a pub in Cheshire Street. Soon Bengali schoolchildren were being allowed out of school early, their mothers walking to work in numbers for fear of being ambushed or pelted, and ...”

“... such as food stamps and prescription drugs for the elderly, will no longer be eligible for green cards. It is estimated that this may affect twenty million poor children, 90 per cent of whom are US citizens. Moreover, the 447 pages of regulations (‘Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds’) are so deliberately complicated that they will undoubtedly ...”

“... mocked the idea of direct elections to a consultative body, but in the 1970s Giscard gave it the green light, in exchange for the small states’ conceding a greater role to intergovernmental summitry. The first Europe-wide elections were held in 1979, but the Parliament’s function was still advisory. The MEPs were not lawmakers; their task was to issue a ...”

“... West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Middle Ages,’ she observed, ‘powerful men have covered their throats.’ The anthropologist David Givens, coiner of the important term ‘neck dimple’ for the area concealed by the tie, saw the moment of the exposed male throat as a true paradigm shift. ‘In the old days of just a few years ago, you had to look powerful in business. But now ...”

“... 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 ...”