“... that it’s possible to purify polluted water by talking to it and that negative feelings turn it green; and that eating in front of the TV contaminates the food, resulting in allergies. His social circle includes Semir (‘Sam’) Osmanagić, who suggested in a 2003 book that Hitler survived the Second World War by escaping to an underground base in ...”

“... Christopher Booker in the Spectator; Malcolm Muggeridge in the Daily Telegraph; Candida Lycett-Green (who was in love with Ingrams at Oxford, speaks adoringly of him in this book, and once worked for the Eye) in the Standard. Nor are the paper’s smallest private squabbles denied space in the press. Marnham asserts in his book that a change came over ...”

“... to unfinish a profile, months to polish a paragraph. In a climate where newspapers folded between green light and delivery, Penman became a master of the unread. Thirty thousand words typed on water, scribbled with a trembling finger on a dusty mirror. His peers spoke of ‘doing’ Penman, as if his customised prose was the drug of choice. Meanwhile, the man ...”

“... College’). Jessy Mair was the wife of Beveridge’s cousin, and remained so until David Mair’s death in 1940, whereupon she became Lady Beveridge. By the beginning of 1921 she was installed as secretary and dean at LSE, with unique access to the director throughout his tenure. She later wrote that she had ‘established when I came to the ...”

“... Only a couple, such as ‘A Dead Boche’ (‘he scowled and stank/With clothes and face a sodden green’), include specific details of the front lines. Just before his 21st birthday Graves was wounded so badly by an exploding shell that for 24 hours he was given up for dead. The colonel of his battalion wrote to his parents to inform them of their loss, and ...”

“... veils’. At her best, she combines religious mysticism with visual clarity as dramatically as David Jones – though one feels she would be at her best more often in a lower key. Carolyn Forché, like Stainer, tackles some very ambitious subjects. In fact, throughout The Angel of History we find nothing but ambitious subjects – Hiroshima, the ...”

“... Williams’s five boys. In April 1994 Maxine had left the family home she shared with her husband David Handley in Newark Knok, and taken the kids to live at the house of her boyfriend Alex Joseph, at Lobelia Close in Beckton. Daniel went to Beckton Cross primary school, and was one of those kids who’d talk to anyone. He already had girlfriends, and was one ...”

“... you can still hear tales of the golden age of South Africa’s Left in many houses in Golders Green or Highgate – only a minority remained so seriously involved that they were willing (and it was a crucial test) to uproot themselves again after 1990 and return to South Africa. For the remnants of the old èlite who did return – and Slovo was their ...”

“... in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. The small bronze version is mounted on a sheer plinth of ice-green glass in the shape of a sharp prow. Nearby are Ivan Shadr’s exuberant torch-bearing athletes – the girl especially lacks the weight and solemnity of Nazi and Fascist equivalents, and has something of the lithe and genial spirit of art deco bathers and ...”

“... the Prince of Wales emerged as a nuisance letter-writer, badgering Government ministers with green-ink missives about the Human Rights Act and the hunting ban, and moans that Cumbrian farmers got a worse deal than blacks and homosexuals. In November the Princess Royal got a criminal record after her pet pit bull gored a child (the dog escaped the chop ...”

“... be vaccinated. By the second half of the 1950s, virologists in South Africa were using African green monkey cells to amplify the Sabin vaccines, while their colleagues in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa were apparently using cells from baboons (and perhaps other species, too) to amplify the Pasteur Institute vaccines of Pierre Lepine. In ...”

“... as the major channel into this country for the theories of the European Enlightenment – or so David Watkin’s generous reading of Soane’s muddled (and, at the time, scarcely audible) Royal Academy lectures would suggest. These rival claims to Soane’s legacy are neatly captured, and subverted, in a cartoon currently on show in Sir John Soane’s ...”

“... tunnels in Rafah. It is a landscape of many colours: from red roofed settlements, through the green pine trees surrounding them and up to the black one-way mirrors of the Allenby border crossing into Jordan, which allow Israeli security agents to monitor Palestinians in transit without themselves being seen. There are many methods of navigation: a bridge ...”

“... radios, clothing) its population demanded. Our understanding of that national economy owes much to David Edgerton, who in a smart piece on port cities explains that inner-city docks declined not just because of containerisation but also because Britain – like France – was once again growing most of its own food; when imports shot up again in the 1980s (of ...”

“... one of her first mature poems: ‘What solace/can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste/grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?’On 25 February 1956, she went to a party for the St Botolph’s Review, and ‘the worst thing happened, that big dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me … came over and was looking hard in my eyes ...”