“... people born when I was, towards the end of April or in the first weeks of May, are home-lovers, green-fingered, deeply conservative, routine-loving, inexorable, well-throated, prone to kidney disorders, peasants. On the other hand, we are also ‘ruled’ by the planet the Greeks called ‘Aphrodite’, which means Venus is anciently ‘at home’ in that ...”

“... Take Back Control mantra have resonance in Danish politics, most notably (on the left) in the Red-Green Alliance, for which the EU is the neoliberal devil incarnate, and (on the right) in the Danish People’s Party, in the name of ethno-nationalist conceptions of ‘independence’. But no opinion poll, no government and no national newspaper has declared in ...”

“... fashion. We were thought to take after our fathers, who venerated Magnus Magnusson and Peter Jay, anybody who looked like the besuited officials that a century of colonial education had taught them to defer to. On Friday nights, when many teenagers were out necking bottles of cheap cider or haggling for lovebites in discos, we would be at home ...”

“... form of Romanticism. According to Hoffmann, listening to Haydn was like walking happily through green fields and forests. Mozart intimates dread, but keeps it at bay with gentle voices of love and melancholy. Beethoven is different. Beethoven, Hoffmann writes, is full of shadow, nightfall, pain. ‘Beethoven’s music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of ...”

“... and those cities must have excellent connections with London.’ Without HS2, Steer argues, the green belt and vast swathes of unprotected countryside will have to be developed. If provision isn’t made for rail, then people will be forced onto the roads. ‘HS2 is all about capacity, not speed,’ he says, ‘and that should have been made clear from the ...”

“... there when the porter came along the platform shouting the mysterious invocation ‘Lancaster Green Ayre’.11 March. R.’s Aunty Stella rings from Edinburgh. She was 90 last week and apologises that she hasn’t learned a new Shakespeare sonnet to mark her birthday. However she recites off by heart, and with no mistakes, ‘Shall I compare thee to a ...”

“... is as kindly as ever and me as dull, three old(-ish) men having their lunch, next stop the bowling green. 10 March. To Durham where there are not many visitors this Wednesday morning and more guides than there are people to show round. See the line of Frosterley marble inset in the floor of the nave, the limit beyond which women were not allowed to approach ...”

“... will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm)./And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.’ These curtailed, interrupted, suspended activities correspond to a present tense that has been abruptly abolished. Mourning is a wound that is also somehow an achievement. It’s no small thing to call on the brain to ...”

“... friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De Quincey was touchy, quick ...”

“... pause. What next? Perhaps there was something on the television. After a long wait a juddering green and mauve herring-bone pattern galvanised itself into an advertisement cartoon about a bouncing blob called Tommy the Thermostat ... I averted my gaze, which happened to fall on the writing-table. If at that moment I had caught sight of my bed I would ...”

“... It is change Gurney is after, and spring means change to him, suddenness, urgency: But how the green has sprung in a single night; What sudden flood bears high the foam of May! ... pinpoints grown to buds between day and day!                                           (‘April Mist’) Or he fears, in a dusk he ...”

“... tradition, Goethe and Schiller, but unlike its sterner English precedents in Westminster Abbey (Peter Scheemakers, 1741) and Stratford (Ronald Gower, 1888), this is a portrait of the writer who circulated sugared sonnets among his private friends. Lessing’s Shakespeare half-sits on his plinth, one foot off the ground, looking quizzically to one side as if ...”

“... school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter Simple’, and he was pleased to see in Hill’s austere lyricism a salutary rejection of vulgar modern mores, so I am not sure what he would have made of ‘Cute, my arse’ – not to mention, from later sections of the poem, ‘a shot of jism’, ‘a ...”

“... when he slipped away from his protection officers, or made public appearances in a less-than-slick green suit his media handlers had banned him from wearing. Eventually, his capacity for compromise on principle – however small – seemed to vanish. The contrast with McDonnell, made in both books, is instructive: his only question for potential allies was ...”