“... indefatigably in the high blue sky. I bought a car (top priority in LA) for $400 – a dented green Chevy Nova with ripped seats and an unquenchable thirst for oil. The Nova did not quite have the vulgar style of my earlier Impala, a two-toned gas-guzzling yacht-like structure into whose rearview mirror police cars would often loom: but at least the Nova ...”

“... Queen Incog’ in this rough and tumble burlesque, and according to her first biographer David Baker, who wrote eight years after her death in 1756, she ‘appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’ with the feckless Hatchett. But that’s as warm as the paternity trail ever gets. It doesn’t help, as Baker also recorded, that ...”

“... not least Freud’s, Kitty is remarkably covered up; she wears a jumper with ribbed neck and green contoured stripes, and a voluptuous velvet skirt. But Freud’s meticulous naturalism and the translucence of his flesh tones lend an almost indecent air of exposure to the portrait. It’s easy to see why critics have interpreted Girl with Roses as a ...”

“... all conceivably be a figment of Seth’s increasingly deranged imagination. There is a series of David Lynch-style time-slip and personality-slip effects. One moment he is in jail in present-day Mississippi; the next he’s a black man in the 1920s, charged with a crime he didn’t commit. The second half of the book is skilfully constructed, page by ...”

“... of risky professional choices: 35 West 9th Street was a handsome Italianate prewar co-op with a green awning anchored to polished brass poles and late-blooming geraniums spilling from terraced window boxes high above; 72 Perry Street, sandwiched between stately townhouses, was a mute, shabby rowhouse painted over in a hideous maroon, with shaded windows ...”

“... universities, where public events on Palestine are all but banned.A single tweet by Volker Beck, a Green Party politician and now a crusader against antisemitism (or, more accurately, anti-Zionism), seemed to be enough to get an event cancelled. When the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, the director of Forensic Architecture, and Francesca Albanese, the UN ...”

“... depending on insider knowledge only others in the trade need feel troubled or titillated by. David Lodge, quoted on an Adair dust jacket saying that The Death of the Author is ‘brilliant, worthy of Nabokov’, is doing something of this kind, pretending innocence, tactfully avoiding the question of pastiche, of who’s actually in charge of this ...”

“... words, the Web introduced a new, non-linear architecture: duck did not have to collocate with green peas, it could also go in other contexts, alongside cricket, eider-filled duvets and any number of other things. Lateral jumps could be made instantaneously simply by clicking on an icon, or using a ‘search engine’, such as Yahoo, Lycos, Alta-Vista or ...”

“... was one of homeliness, craftsmanship and simplicity. Its location was the cottage and the village green, not the great hall and the long gallery. Objects of relative indifference to a philistine public, country houses were seen by a barbarian aristocracy under economic pressure as assets to be exploited. There were regular auctions of furniture and pictures ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... books were decorated with Bewick woodcuts; the later ones, like Spoken History, owe much to David Gentleman’s line-drawings. Gentleman’s illustrations can be surrounded in the mind’s eye in the same way as Bewick’s can, by an enclosing circle, so that we feel we might reach out and grasp that little world, take hold of the lost ...”

“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”

“... most ardent supporters, fresh air was to be had in abundance from the creation of new parks and green spaces. The latter project was supported by the Church, on the grounds that what was good for the lungs was also good for the soul, ‘improvement’ all the way down. It also spawned the great Second Empire myth of the park as a space for the amicable ...”

“... Aga Khan had fallen in love with its wind-eroded granite shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters. He and a few investor friends bought 38 miles of coast and 13,000 hectares of land from the daughters of peasants in the area (the sons inherited the more fertile inland plots), hired five architects and built a resort town, Porto Cervo, more easily ...”

“... if its eyes are on the future, is a stage for models in 1950s costume (as if) strolling by vintage green Fords. Having kept old cars and dresses in good repair for decades of el bloqueo may at last prove a moneymaker. The island is preparing its return to the ‘US sphere’. And perhaps painting and photograph have more in common, judged strictly as responses ...”