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“... There is a painter in Henry James’s Roderick Hudson called Sam Singleton: ‘He painted small landscapes, mainly in watercolours . . . improvement had come hand in hand with patient industry.’ His appearance (he is a small plain man), his regular working hours and his modest equanimity (he has a tendency to blush) are a foil to Roderick’s good looks and labile temperament ...”

“... Clarke. Elizabeth and Mary were obsessed with each other. Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII; her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor. While most of Europe thought of Elizabeth as a bastard – how could a daughter of Anne Boleyn be otherwise? – Mary was as legitimate as ...”

“... back at his old trade of ‘exploiting and distorting family secrets’, as his dentist brother Henry puts it. Henry – at least in Nathan’s account of him – is normality personified: his successful New Jersey life includes a perfect family and a satisfactory mistress in Wendy – ‘a nice kid with an oral hang-up ...”

“... Henry Reed was a sad man but a funny man, and his poems are funny or sad – often, as in the celebrated ‘Lessons of the War’, both at once. I first met him in 1965, in the office of Robert Heilman, then the benevolent but firm head of the English Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Calling to present my credentials, I walked into a row; Heilman benevolently firm, Reed furious, licensed to be furious ...”

“... writing, as if he’s amazed at his own cheek in offering up a pub or boarding house for scrutiny. Henry Green, another well-spoken alcoholic who had a sympathetic interest in goings-on below stairs, was in most respects his antitype. In spite of his contempt for avant-gardism, however, Hamilton’s writerly compulsions and constraints can make his books ...”

“... B-52s for paltry and self-interested reasons; that he certainly connived in and probably gave the green light to the assassination attempt on Archbishop Makarios, to the Indonesian genocide in East Timor, all manner of atrocities in Chile, including the assassinations of Orlando Letelier in Washington and General René Schneider in Chile, and further genocide ...”

“... this way or cabbages spaced just so.Picture gardens tend to put painters off. In The Tragic Muse Henry James describes the reaction of a young painter called Nick Dormer to a garden of that sort. Nick feels himself ‘catch the smile’ of ‘named and numbered acres’. He appreciates that they have a ‘charm to which he had not perhaps hitherto done ...”

“... enthusiasm – already developed by the 1860s – for the obscure Spanish painter El Greco. Sir Henry Layard, the trustee most vehemently opposed to Robinson, considered El Greco to be a ‘clever, but eccentric and rather repulsive painter’ whose best works ‘show a strange mixture of powerful, though frequently false, colouring and execrable ...”

“... Henry Moore was attracted by the idea of monumentality. He tried hard, but with limited success, to find ways of incorporating his sculpture into modern buildings. He also had the attractive idea of locating some of his statues in remote settings, following the example of his friend the late Sir William Keswick, who placed four of Moore’s sculptures, as well as one by Rodin and one by Epstein, in the wild landscape of the estate he owned in south-west Scotland ...”

“... young curates send hearts aflutter’; and the desolating entirely contemporary village of A Few Green Leaves as ‘the picture of life in a town forgotten by time’. It would be absurd to make Barbara Pym’s ten novels-light, dry and unpretentious as they are-sound obscure or difficult. Their salient qualities can be caught, or at least intimated, in a ...”

“... fought that same year in a blizzard on Palm Sunday, he took the throne from the weak, ineffectual Henry VI and was crowned King Edward IV.Usurpers were plentiful in the 15th century. Edward’s claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of ...”

“... to nature. His strength lies in his method of weighing up someone’s case or view – often a Green one or, in earlier parlance, a Pastoral, primitivist or Romantic one – by testing it against what was happening on the ground. If we are possessed by an inspiring vision of Britain and America as one green weave of ...”

“... photograph of Twombly in Rome, standing by the hand of the colossus of Constantine. In 1778, Henry Fuseli drew himself crestfallen, seated by the foot and hand of the colossus, and called it ‘The artist moved to despair at the grandeur of antique fragments’. His figure – lightly sketched – is almost invisible beside the giant remnants of the ...”

“... road by a knee-high wall from which the railings had been removed during the war. Here William’s green-fingered wife, Hetta, had made a verdant brief oasis of multi-coloured shrubbery: japonica, Japanese tree peony, clematis, forsythia, almond blossom, euphorbia, a rustic arch of rambling roses, all manner of bulbs, and a dwarf oak cut like a mushroom, a ...”

“... the widest spreading, the noblest of the trees common in London streets, parks and squares.The green tide is rising because more trees are planted than are cut down – or so it seems to the casual eye – and because few are trimmed to size, fewer than would be the case in France. The height of the tide will depend on taste and on what is often still ...”