“... bold Fenian men’ or complaining (after 1921) of the bondage which shackles one of her ‘four green fields’, this plangent yet bloodthirsty crone is as worn a cultural token as those related feminine stereotypes, Dark Rosaleen and Cathleen Ní Houlihan. In the rapidly modernising Ireland of satellite TV and legalised divorce, she might seem an exhausted ...”

“... way palm oil was later positioned as a healthy alternative to trans fats and, in the form of ‘green’ biofuel, as an ethical alternative to fossil fuels. It has also been used to create detergents advertised as being ‘plant-based’, ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘natural’. The marketing of Price’s candles was, according to Robins, one of ...”

“... courted Putin scarcely less, but with fewer economic trumps in hand. Within Europe itself, the Red-Green government in Berlin, for all its well-advertised generational lack of complexes, never rocked the boat in the way its Christian Democrat predecessor in Bonn had done. Since 1991, in fact, there has been no action to compare with Kohl’s unilateral ...”

“... it.’ Aiken was also the recipient of this meditation: ‘The idea of a submarine world of clear green light – one would be attached to a rock and swayed in two directions – would one be happiest or most wretched at the turn of the tide?’ This fancy probably owes something to some strenuous lines in Antony and ...”

“... a member of Shakespeare’s company speaking so dismissively – unless perhaps in some fit of green-room bitchiness – of a work that commanded wide public interest and respect. In 1598 Francis Meres named Richard II first among the tragedies by Shakespeare that demonstrated his and the nation’s theatrical excellence. In 1600 John Bodenham’s and ...”

“... here. More than two hundred years later, this sense had not yet faded; with a cheeky rhyme, Robert Burns attributed such devices to the devil: ‘Then you, ye auld, snic-drawing dog!/Ye came to Paradise incog/An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue.’ By the time Burns was writing, ‘brogue’ also commonly described ‘a rude kind of shoe generally ...”

“... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...”

“... Patterson hunted them down. The railway climbed on, created a little town of corrugated iron and green canvas in an insect-ridden swamp fed by a little river called, in Masai, ‘Nairobi’, meaning ‘cold water’, and drove on to Lake Victoria. As Kenneth Cameron puts it, ‘East Africa had become safariland.’ I was disappointed not to see Cameron’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Moore would say that she is ‘too unrelenting’ in The Colossus, her first book of poems; Robert Lowell would put the same thought another way by saying that in Ariel she was playing ‘Russian Roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’. I also remember feeling that I was liking something that it was a cliché for me to like. I thought she was ...”

“... can see, was a 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 ...”

“... him as politically more intransigent than less mystic opponents of the Tory war regime. He pursued Robert and Leigh Hunt venomously, for having taken his paintings of Nelson and Pitt to be icons of reaction (a mistake, if it was one – Blake himself never said so – shared by not a few art historians), accusing them of responsibility for a war they were more ...”

“... he could have been another Beefheart. Instead, he peeled off into racist millennialism, the Green Room at San Quentin, the TV interviews – in which he looks like a wasted George Best carved out of rotten marzipan. Manson’s career proves, if nothing else, that satire has a strictly enforceable shelf-life. The high-risk conclusion to Watson’s epic ...”

“... The Grapes of Wrath is an appallingly hollow posture of stoicism; The Informer risible; How Green Was My Valley a monstrous slurry of tears and coal dust; Tobacco Road meandering nonsense; Three Godfathers shameless; and The Fugitive inane. Mister Roberts is pious; Gideon boring; The Long Gray Line monotonous. Stagecoach is sometimes cited for its ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”