“... a few lines on one side of it; Moore’s vast archive of unpublished poetry was drawn on by Peter Riley for two posthumous collections, Lacrimae Rerum (1988) and Longings of the Acrobats (1990), but for the most part sleeps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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating “oeuvre” is unavoidable,’ he told Peter McDonald in an interview, ‘but the very word sounds so pompous – you know, those people who talk about “my work”.’ Still, for all Longley’s likeable unpretentiousness, an oeuvre, with the sustained imaginative integrity that implies, is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Barrie, nor the small-town gothic that reacted to it, in George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901) or John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914). Kinraddie, ‘the new minister’ proclaims at the end of the prelude to Sunset Song, ‘was the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny briar bush in the lee of a house ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in council housing, Southwark, which changed hands in May’s local elections from Labour to a Green-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats, is the country’s fourth largest municipal landlord, after Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield. Historically a poor and neglected part of South London, its proximity to the City and the West End has made it popular ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... his daring: ‘I have now the pleasure of going where nobody goes, and seeing what nobody sees.’ Peter Levi’s perception rings true, I think, when he comments: ‘What Johnson specially wanted in Scotland was to understand wild or primitive or savage life … He felt some of the emotions in the Highlands that Darwin in the Beagle felt when he saw his first ...”

“... Books, a gay publishing house that received funding from the GLC and was based on Clerkenwell Green, near where I lived. She poured a lot of energy into the job. She was efficient and didn’t mind hard work. She was helpful. When the two men who ran the press, Roy Trevelion and Tenebris Light, went on holiday to Gran Canaria, she willingly redecorated ...”