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“... Library, contains the only surviving copy of the late 14th-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It lacks a title and shares the manuscript with three other poems of a devotional character, also without titles, and probably, according to the experts, by the same poet. Of this group Pearl, an allegory about a man’s grief at the death of his ...”

“... units, each mounted with four fluorescent tubes. They form a glowing, waist-high wall of green light which blocks the way to the ramp leading to the upper level. Objects shown in this foyer, despite its considerable size, tend not to seem part of the rest of an exhibition. The ramp draws you on and you pass quickly (often too quickly) to what comes ...”

“... to see the flags and bunting, as if yellow was a thing they’d never seen before – and red, and green – as if, for them, the world was always white: snow on their lips and hands and a shine in their eyes that made us think of children like ourselves watching a magic lantern in the dark and falling, through slide after slide, into understanding. The Wisdom ...”

“... after Robert Aickman Your sisters flash like jewels, bright as needles. They’re threading languid reels in the ballroom. Your heart is young and taut; your heart is strung with sparkling futures. Put an eye up to each one. Diamond Sixteen and juiced beneath the discoball. Your pulse, a worried minnow. Repeating rigmarole of knife and nerve, plastic cups ...”

“... On Wednesday, 25 September 1661, we find him making his way from St Martin’s Lane with Colonel Robert Slingsby: ‘He and I in his coach through the Mewes, which is the way that now all coaches are forced to go, because of a stop at Charing Cross, by reason of a drain there to clear the streets.’ He had been down that way the previous October, at St ...”

“... means that if you scratched his back, he was under no obligation to scratch yours: Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Ian Hamilton Finlay are three Scottish poets whose work he dismisses where he might have been expected, if only for tactical reasons, to approve it. It is the same with Scottish literature of the past. MacDiarmid is almost alone among its ...”

“... rakes to draw in the takings, while seedy gentlemen in evening dress sit at tables covered in green baize and put pistols to their heads. Haughty harlots in furs, admiring epileptics, parricides and remittance men stand in the shadowy margins and look on. There are also some rakish cavalry officers, who would be more at home in a pinball machine based on ...”

“... would gather at the bank watching the large blocks of ice cracking and drifting in the blackish-green water. Teenage boys, baskets in hand, would tread and hop on the floating ice, picking up pike, whitefish, carp, baby sturgeon and catfish killed by the ice blocks that had been washed down by spring torrents. Steamboats, still in the docks, blew their ...”

“... the odour of dust and sunlight. And it could all be held then and pasted in his black book on his green felt table and seen as evidence of, if nothing else, the impossibility of answers.’ One of the strengths of the novel comes from that respect for facts, with the implied ‘impossibility of answers’. Objective recording of facts has much the same role ...”

“... For Robert Adamson A blue smear bulges over the ridge; there’s the counterpoint as well of shine on white-hot duco glimpsed on the ute parked outside on the driveway. It blinds its surrounds with a surfboard beach-effect. It’s as ominous as the Mary Celeste – it looks lonely, isolated parked there, brilliant in tinfoil sharpness of afternoon light ...”

“... or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the Green Party used to introduce last month’s election broadcast – divided the history of the planet into Six Days of Creation, each 666 million years long. On this now familiar scale, dinosaurs appear at 4 p.m. on the last day and have disappeared by 9 ...”

“... about its anxieties, distortions and deformations, was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel, which until the mid-1980s every trade unionist, Labour Party member and left-leaning student in Britain could safely be said to have read, or at least heard of. Then in 1984 everyone put it down and picked up Money. For the benefit of anyone too ...”

“... The Force (1966), has a title surely designed to evoke Thomas’s ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. In Redgrove’s work, as in Thomas’s, sexual energy and the force of the natural world are conjoined. The Force is, among other things, a celebration of Redgrove’s first marriage and family, but it’s filled with wildly ...”

“... the new informalities unutterably hollow: ‘Each afternoon, when the whole city beyond the dark green shutters of their hotel windows began to stir, Colin and Mary were woken by the methodical chipping of steel tools against the iron barges which moored by the hotel café pontoon.’ Colin and Mary Who? Or rather, since they turn out not to be ...”

“... in the Family Record Centre on Myddleton Street in Clerkenwell (now closed down); marriages were green; deaths, black. The lists of deaths recorded overseas were kept in separate folders. Of the 58 volumes of ‘deaths abroad’ since 1849, 17 – almost a third – were dedicated to the years 1914-21. Of those 17, one contained the names of all the marines ...”