“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... meaning, you might say that someone now was flavoured with the essences belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced ...”

“... my own views on the origins of honours examinations in late Georgian Oxford corroborated by V.H.H. Green in his chapter on ‘Reformers and Reform in the University’. A giant’s strength is wonderful, proclaims Miranda, but not if monstrously used. If, however, as Metternich said, you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them, then surely you can do ...”

“... have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the ...”

“... box and stand up for heroin?’And it’s an essay of a modernity you don’t expect from the leaf-green Penguin Crimes of the 1950s, a close study of duration, airlessness, inescapability. The long hours in Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey, beneath its ritual function ‘no more than a large room’. Days and nights and years as suffered by the poor dying ...”

“... at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the ...”

“... the plausible mismatches of nature’s palette? ‘Brown woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast on the aquamarine lake.’ White matters less than Joyce, about whom Nabokov, on occasion, could be unruefully generous. In one interview, he gave out this undeniable admission: ‘my English is patball to Joyce’s champion ...”

“... and then at last there floated into Dick’s mind the image of himself as a child, dressed in green velvet and lace, a perfect Bubbles boy, kneeling on Auntie Loo’s lap and arranging a troop of lead soldiers on the horizontal projection of her corsage.’ The psychoanalyst concludes that the root of Richard’s problem is that he has, ‘consciously or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”