“... a poor thing if I thank them here alphabetically. They include Mr Gerald Albertini, The Rt Hon. Peter Archer MP, Miss Amanda Aspinall, Dr Robert Aspinall, The Duke of Atholl, Miss Julie Battersea, Mr Tom Begg, Dr Kurt Benirschke, Mr Robin Birley, Mr Anthony Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David ...”

“... literary affiliations in James Hogg, and in such a novel as George Douglas’s The House with the Green Shutters. These are certainly present in the more sensational side of his work. But Twenty Thousand Streets has a quite different and much more English atmosphere, finding its models (and they are very obviously to be detected) in Dickens, J.B. Priestley ...”

“... of course, Victor proceeded to do, armed with a Bible and a carving knife. Morrison’s poem about Peter Sutcliffe is, on one level, a reworking of Auden’s ‘Victor’ which also manages to define the exact distance between Auden’s Thirties, and Morrison’s Eighties. Written in broad Yorkshire, in ringingly regular rhyme and metre, it looks, at first ...”

“... was spared to him – he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since Rullion Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to his fathers. ‘Stevenson and Sons’, the maker’s mark on Edinburgh streetlamps (a company sideline), would always remind Stevenson of his failure to add to the family pride in a way which suited ...”

“... the 1935 lyric ‘To Be Hungry Is to Be Great’: The small yellow grass-onion, spring’s first green, precursor to Manhattan’s pavements, when plucked as it comes, in bunches washed, split and fried in a pan, though inclined to be a little slimy, if well cooked and served hot on rye bread is to beer a perfect appetiser – and the best part of it is they ...”

“... a family paper and listening in when London’s radical intelligentsia (the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, the Communard Louise Michel, the Fabian Annie Besant, and a host of suffragists and socialists) talked politics at their house on Russell Square. Emmeline started a business selling Arts and Crafts soft furnishings and decorations, but it ...”

“... wielded by humanity. By the 1960s at the latest the new times were upon us, with the postwar ‘green revolution’ (the name may sound ironic today) well underway. Scientific farming encouraged galloping growth in human numbers, through higher crop yields; the breakneck urbanisation of the global South, as redundant farmworkers swelled the cities; and ...”

“... such as ‘everglaze’, a longed-for skirt of ‘terylene’ with permanent pleats, a ‘dull green overcoat’, the slacks Sargeson preferred her to wear, the ‘large fawn cardigan with a hood’ she knitted herself, her Roman sandals, a black mantilla for going to church in Andorra. She was someone to whom people gave things, and perhaps the ...”

“... Roundheads and jubilant Cavaliers, the explanation for all the cars some mock-battle in Green Park. Note how one passes these far from sheepish figures without a second glance; the kind of extraordinary feature of ordinary life that never gets into a film except as part of the plot.In the evening, read at St Mark’s, Primrose Hill in aid of the ...”

“... Hill, ordered tardily for Afghanistan at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to ...”

“... tourists love, just as there’s a head of Joyce, which no one much looks at, in St Stephen’s Green. When Nora stood Joyce up on 14 June, he wrote to her ardently, demanding another date. They met on 16 June, which is when their story began, and when Ulysses both began and ended. Lucky it wasn’t on Good Friday, when the pubs are closed. I wonder if the ...”

“... its way to the library of Cornell University; quotations from it appear in John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello’s 1997 biography of John Stanislaus. On 26 and 27 and 28 May, Charlie Joyce noted that his father was drunk, and again on 31 May and 1 and 2 and 13 and 14 and 15 June. And on Sunday 24 June: ‘Pappie home to dinner very drunk: shouting, swearing ...”

“... the fairy queen, who was ‘fretting her life out for want of some milk that has the scent of the green grass in it, and of the fresh upper air’.Fairies need us for blood and milk and depend on us in other ways too. They have often been accused of pinching human food and tools (which they sometimes but not always return) and there are tales of them ...”

“... and speak English, but the lingua franca is still Juba Arabic, a somewhat impoverished dialect. Peter, my boda-boda (motorcycle-taxi) driver, is Ugandan; for although the major businesses here all belong to government ministers and governors, or to their children, the gilded youth of Juba who returned from abroad after the peace agreements, almost all ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”