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“... was probably no causal connection, but it meant that my publisher could buy me the original of a Peter Brookes cartoon which appeared in the Times. It shows a House of Commons green bench, deserted apart from two figures. Fox, eyes staring and face aghast, is reading out his resignation speech, while next to him a ...”

“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... party’s finances that has seen its treasurer, Colin Beattie, and its outgoing chief executive, Peter Murrell (who happens to be Sturgeon’s husband), arrested and then released without charge. Yet there is a deeper political problem facing Scottish nationalism. In absorbing so much of Labour’s urban vote, the SNP has finally tipped the scales of its own ...”

“... caps, or else the whole second storey was like a roof, covered in shingles. The shingles were dark green or maroon or brown. The porches came to within a few feet of the sidewalk and the spaces between the houses seemed narrow enough for people to reach out the side windows and shake hands. Children were playing on the sidewalk, but Queenie took no more notice ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... fictional device, a point of view. She appends a small anthology of the poems, well translated by Peter Norman, that she deems necessary for an understanding of her narrative. Anatoly Nayman, a poet and playwright, was, along with Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, one of a group of young writers whom Akhmatova made her spiritual children. He met her in 1959 ...”

“... a few lines on one side of it; Moore’s vast archive of unpublished poetry was drawn on by Peter Riley for two posthumous collections, Lacrimae Rerum (1988) and Longings of the Acrobats (1990), but for the most part sleeps undisturbed in the Cambridge University Library. Moore’s few, but fervent, admirers are hoping that a fresh Selected to be ...”

“... is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This feels a bit previous to me: to use someone else’s quote is OK, but their layout too?) The early Mods ...”

“... they were open to social contact. A red badge meant: ‘Nobody should try to interact with me.’ Green meant: ‘I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.’ As a result of the prominence given to the Autism Wars, it took a long time for the autism-rights message to move from the fringes to the ...”

“... bloodless abstraction – ‘All theory is grey, my friend,’ as Goethe observed, ‘but forever green is the tree of life.’ Carey sometimes takes this line: it lies behind his admiration for Ted Hughes, for instance, whose poetry exposes ‘the fragility and misplaced pride of the human intellect’. But, as Stefan Collini has observed, what really gets ...”

“... returned to England from America and was living again in his rooms at 3 Bolton Street, just off Green Park. ‘Instead of superficial contacts with the British upper classes,’ James’s biographer Leon Edel reports, ‘James began to form friendships of a more significant kind – with members of his own class, the writers and artists of London.’ There ...”

“... make out the extent of the reconstruction: all the buildings lining the avenue looked new, their green roofs and canary-yellow façades brightening the gloomy countryside around them; even there, on the outskirts of the city, you have to look for a long time, and know what you’re looking for, to notice the scars of the old trenches or of the tank ...”

“... Charles Addams ‘and his wife, Deborah Kerr’. 24 September. Marcel Marceau dies. Much hated by Peter Cook (‘Marcel Arsehole’), who couldn’t stand the reverence with which mime was treated. Still it gave him a good joke: ‘I was there,’ he used to say, ‘the night Marcel Marceau dried.’ 2 October. Ned Sherrin dies who very much figured in the ...”

“... which I find the most attractive of flowers. Aconites, snug and tight-budded in their cosy green frills, always cheer me up, much more than the ragged and anaemic snowdrops, of which we have a profusion.14 February, Yorkshire. When we had the central heating overhauled a slightly larger radiator was put in the downstairs loo. It’s a small room ...”

“... that last line, ‘The leaves should be lush and the petals frail’ (or, more literally, ‘The green should be stronger and the red weaker’), is usually interpreted as symbolising a man, who supposedly gains strength, and a woman, who supposedly loses it, after they have made love. The other poem in the same ci form is by a man, the ...”