“... of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the ...”

“... will do the interview better if I can use the toilet first.’ Afterwards she sits down in her green mac and purple headscarf, the knuckles of one large mottled hand resting on the clean scrubbed table, and explains how she has devised a method of ‘getting on the wireless’. I was to ask the BBC to give me a phone-in programme (‘something someone like ...”

“... 1910 and located two-thirds of the way between Brondesbury and Kilburn Station and Willesden Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders ...”

“... Ulysses of the Dantean phase, with an unappeasable hunger for wilder shores. In Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins the hero makes landfall in the Antarctic; where the inhabitants, like the fish of the Southern Hemisphere, can fly. There he falls in love with the beautiful Youwarkee, who falls to earth outside his hut. Strange remote stuff, but not half so ...”

“... was his bag (in high art they call it ‘selective quotation’ or ‘homage’). Having sampled Peter Cave’s biker novelettes, and the works of Mick Norman, Alex R. Stuart and Thom Ryder, he nominated the 18-volume Richard Allen Bildungsroman as his template. Delivered from the bourgeois neurosis invention (the demand for fresh ‘product’), his charged ...”

“... road by a knee-high wall from which the railings had been removed during the war. Here William’s green-fingered wife, Hetta, had made a verdant brief oasis of multi-coloured shrubbery: japonica, Japanese tree peony, clematis, forsythia, almond blossom, euphorbia, a rustic arch of rambling roses, all manner of bulbs, and a dwarf oak cut like a mushroom, a ...”

“... There is a pre-echo of the Essay on Man in # 119 (‘We descry Millions of Species subsisted on a green Leaf, which your Glasses represent only in Crowds and Swarms ...’), and of Swift’s ‘rhapsody’ on poetry in # 229: The whole Creation preys upon itself: Every living Creature is inhabited. A Flea has a Thousand invisible Insects that teaze him as he ...”

“... for them by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, with a curiously shaped white ceiling, white walls and a green-khaki rubberised floor. It was a space described by Kasmin as ‘a machine for looking at pictures in’; those pictures, moreover, were prototypes of the new art. They looked as if they had been painted to be seen in museums: the space was designed for ...”

“... the Spaniard’s cruelty, On the Saint’s Day now, the Saint Sits in the plaza under a bower of green, While the dancers, Beautiful in dignity of pace and gesture, Dance for him as well as for the Corn. In Brazil, one gathers (yes, ‘one gathers’ – for translations, it’s too seldom remembered, are meant for ignoramuses), in Brazil there are ...”

“... Charter 88 and the Institute for Public Policy Research are promoting the two in harness, as Peter Pulzer explained in the last number of the London Review. Liberty (the NCCL) and polemicists such as Keith Ewing and Ronald Dworkin have confined their attention to a Bill of Rights alone. But the yoking of the two is not accidental. It reflects the cast of ...”

“... trial, he had already had four clandestine meetings with the son of Michael Taylor, a former Green Beret who specialised in springing wealthy people out of tricky situations in foreign countries, and an escape plan was largely in place. A few days later it went into effect. Retracing the steps of Taylor’s team on Ghosn’s last day in Japan, you might ...”

“... Samoon, a 13-year-old who had had pressure put on him by his father and his uncle. He had very green eyes and couldn’t stop laughing. ‘I would like my own life now and I would like to be a civil engineer.’ The boy who sat next to him was called Ibrahim and he wanted to be a pilot. ‘I would like to help my country,’ he added. People who work with ...”

“... British understatement almost too well, as his biographical note on the back of vintage green Penguins demonstrates, noting his ‘slight difficulty that during the blitz our house was twice demolished while we were inside it’. He also reproduced in caricatural form the wooden passions of the domestic product. He had, though, spent some years in ...”

“... army, The island dead, Column on column, each with a stone banner Raised over his head. A green wave full of fish Drifted far In wavering westering ebb-drawn shoals beyond Sinker or star. A labyrinth of celled And waxen pain. Yet I come to the honeycomb often, to sip the finished Fragrance of men. ‘Kirkyard’ is the first complete Brown poem ...”

“... that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met by the Bavarian ambassador, Count Karl von Spaur, who was clutching a pistol in his right hand, in case they were challenged. The fugitive was bustled into a small open carriage and driven out of the city, his face obscured by ...”