“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thing hide a dazzle of wonder, is a recurrent feature of the tales (several of which have St Peter or the Virgin Mary roaming the earth), and is why they give the impression of being rooted in the experience of people who work with their hands or who need to imagine their way into a less gritty and less subsistence-based existence. Cinderella is a ...”

“... resource. The police took statements from many of the women working on the streets around Glasgow Green, just east of the city centre, and among the deserted night-time office blocks of Anderston, on its western edge. One man in particular recurred often in these statements, slowly driving around the streets looking at the women, talking to them, paying 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green.’ Heaney, preoccupied with ‘the government of the tongue’, was drawn into the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and inclusiveness stirred up by the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which covered 1500 years of work in ...”

“... of garters made from the skin of a stag and inscribed in the blood of a hare, then stuffed with green mugwort and the eyes of a barbel fish. Incense is to be concocted from bat’s blood after the magician has exorcised the bat in the names of a few dozen angels. Earthen vessels, parchment and wax for candles must be made ready according to precise ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an active homosexual’; Peter Levi that ‘homosexual love was to Elizabethans inevitably chaste.’ Pull the other one, Peter. No one watching Marlowe’s Edward II could have felt for one moment that the relationship between Edward and Gaveston was ...”