“... neck’ (Roger Shattuck); ‘Sun neck cut’ (Beverley Bie Brahic); ‘Let the sun beheaded be’ (David Lehman); ‘Sun sundered head’ (Martin Sorrell); ‘Sun throat cut’ (Ron Padgett). The compression of this lurid image of the dawn must have greatly appealed to Beckett; indeed his streamlined version possibly takes its cue from the phrase, for it ...”

“... he had lived mostly in Greece. He still painted landscapes, but his work had none of the damp, green, memory-sodden melancholy of the English and Welsh valleys. The light in them was sharp, reflected off the Aegean; his palette in paintings such as Landscape, Hydra (1960-62) shimmers. The figures in these vivid landscapes were seldom single: they were ...”

“... on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper and mechanised commander, McChrystal rose quickly through the ranks. He was deployed for a few months to Afghanistan in 2002 before returning to serve in the office of the Joint Chiefs as the Pentagon’s debriefer to Congress and the ...”

“... citizens of the Commonwealth in 1948. In his documentary The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files, David Olusoga observed that the 1948 British Nationality Act was intended to attract Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, who would be easily absorbed into the majority population, restoring Britain’s manpower after the war, while keeping it ...”

“... the state. Those writers who were influenced by Continental ideas – Coleridge, Carlyle or T.H. Green – remained on the margin, at least when it came to politics. Britons gloried in the non-doctrinal nature of their politics. ‘Britain is not governed by logic,’ Disraeli proclaimed, ‘she is governed by parliament.’ And Balfour, no stranger to the ...”

“... have stood any district but W1 or SW1. Anything near the Harrow Road, or the canal, or Kensal Green cemetery had to be avoided at all costs. My particular cross is to be a “fashionable preacher”, as they say. Bertha is quite right when she says that somebody must minister to the rich.’   ‘Of course,’ said Ianthe. ‘And you have some very ...”

“... align. I am Miss Stein and this bay is mine I am Miss Stein (pronounced Steen) and this sea is green That’s Porter, ventriloquising Gertrude Stein; but it could easily be one of the voices of Morgan. Yet where Morgan, like Miroslav Holub, chose to stay in his native land whether or not he was happy with its literary or party politics, Porter’s ...”

“... zealots, wondering if it had some connection with Britain’s commercial stake in Iran. In 1951, David Astor’s Observer was no less protective of British interests when it described Mossadegh as a ‘fanatic’ and a ‘tragic Frankenstein … obsessed with one xenophobic idea’. ‘There was disquiet across the white world,’ de Bellaigue writes, at ...”

“... Camp Ashraf after the invasion came away convinced that the group could be a useful ally. General David Phillips, a military policeman who spent time there in 2004, argues that the MEK is no more a cult than the US marines: in both organisations you have to wear a uniform, obey orders and follow rituals that seem bizarre to the uninitiated. Positive feelings ...”

“... the aspect of free market economics that Conservatives – even supposedly bright ones like David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts – stubbornly fail to absorb is that unintended consequences apply just as much to market-oriented panaceas as to statist policies. Cameron’s political achievement may have been to decontaminate and then quickly recontaminate ...”

“... that too when you put them almost in the manner of riddles for you tell me nothing relative to the green substance which you sent me or where it came from or under what circumstances found[.]’ All this from a man who was the archetype of a heroic loner according to his earliest biographers, John Tyndall, his friend and colleague, and J.H. Gladstone, a ...”

“... painted books, ancient chants, plaster statues’, with too much downtime for hunting, cards and green chartreuse. They live in denial until the rising body count forces the abbot to concede: ‘It’s all over … Our life here. The monastic life in England.’ Puzzles and deaths drift up like the snow that eventually transforms Scarnsea into a locked-room ...”

“... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...”

“... air. Ravers joined in a raggedy coalition with the New Travellers, whose knowledge of England’s green spaces proved crucial to evading the police. Out of this emerged the ‘free party’: an outdoor gathering that broadly resembled the free festivals of the 1970s and 1980s, but with space rock and campfires swapped for cutting-edge electronic music and ...”

“... set in a Soho bookies, and Small Holdings (1995), about a privatised park in Palmers Green. After these came a succession of comedies marked by their energy, idiosyncrasy and eclecticism, featuring depressed, phobic or panicked characters. In the decade leading up to H(A)PPY, Barker published five substantial novels, including The Yips and ...”