“... one of the Gannet Clusters, an archipelago off Labrador: Everywhere I look I can see eggs: blue, green, red and white, but mostly an indifferent khaki colour. Almost all the eggs are intact but some are broken with their orange-yellow yolk and bloody part-grown embryos spilled out onto the rocks. There are eggs piled up in corners, eggs in shit-filled ...”

“... with an engaging mixed metaphor (‘Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I’m green behind the ears’). Then he turned McCain’s repeated accusation from the first debate that he didn’t understand foreign policy issues to his own advantage, confessing that there were some things he didn’t understand, including ‘how we ended up ...”

“... as Stiomrebhaigh), a site of extraordinary beauty and habitability, is still mantled in dense green turf, backed by an outcrop for building stone, with a peat moss just yards away. The best houses were roomy, with vegetable fields enclosed by stone dykes. A stand of aspens chatters on the bluff above a river flowing out of a circular tidal lochan which ...”

“... including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in Bayswater, she noticed a map of ...”

“... the deaths of Iraqi soldiers in their war against Iran, and I was escorted by smart Arabs in olive-green uniforms, much like the ‘jungle green’ I wore, thirty years ago, as a National Serviceman dropping in on Aden and Port Said, on the way to the New Territories of China. This state occasion was alarming to me. I had ...”

“... has got scary, industrialised agriculture makes me angry and I’m delighted to be living in a green moment, with Labour and the Tories both desperate to appear the more eco-friendly party. On the other hand, the craze for ethical living relies rather heavily on its own kind of consumerism and being green can seem merely ...”

“... out the difference between a quarter and 20 per cent. The comfortingly conservative Dixon of Dock Green’s regular television audience of 13 million suggested ‘that many viewers still preferred nostalgia and reassurance’ to the ‘grittiness and realism’ of programmes like Z Cars; nonetheless, Z Cars peaked at 17 million viewers and, with its ...”

“... rioters. The first sign of the legal chaos to come manifested itself on 11 August at Camberwell Green magistrates court, when a 23-year-old student of previous good character was sent to prison for six months for stealing bottled water worth £3.50. Six months’ incarceration is the maximum that magistrates are able to impose for a single offence, and ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... to a beautifully distinctive small mansion (including a 15-acre croft and woods) on the smiling green slopes of Easter Ross. Throughout all this he pleased himself. He did not write to other people’s formulae (or not exactly). When Cape wanted him to repeat the Juan model in his fourth novel, he declined, and wrote on Scottish themes. Then when he felt ...”

“... is that nothing is just what an android needs, a mark of real class. Michael Fassbender plays David, the android, with terrific, elegant style, not as if he were Peter O’Toole but as if he liked Peter O’Toole – a fine distinction. His uniform makes him look like a prisoner rather than a servant, and the effect is that of one of the more likeable ...”

“... projectionist (‘SS-man Ellerkamp’) and the Cosmologist (a Strangelove figure set in a Caspar David Friedrich icescape) add to the richness of the texture while reinforcing the central ideal that what we are seeing is no more than a film about a film. Hitler, muses Ellerkamp, was ‘the greatest film-maker of all time’. Two principal narrators, Harry ...”

“... David Mitchell​ is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key coming-of-age story, set in Worcestershire in 1982, full of references to Findus Crispy Pancakes, the Falklands War and playground slang ...”

“... wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS. As Pym’s diary records, they had kipper pâté to start, after sherry; and then ‘veal done with peppers and tomatoes, Pommes ...”

“... an activity that has brought with it the habit of judging light and dark while ignoring red and green. From very early on there were painters who separated the two registers, laying in colour over monochrome underpainting; and old arguments about how pictures should be made are often driven by a sense that they are constructed, and even read, layer by ...”