“... losing face, being deep or superficial – get brought back weirdly to life.) The historian Robert Stradling pointed out some time ago that during the 44 years of Philip’s reign there was not a single day of peace; and most of the wars were far from being triumphs. This may be relevant.We might compare the lost face of Mars with that in another ...”

“... she had forgotten for a moment that she was Armenian.We were sitting on a bench, facing the dark green waters of the Caspian. Marina scanned the scene: mothers pushing their children in buggies, teenagers posing for selfies and a few older Bakuvians power-walking along the promenade. ‘We have to forget and move on,’ she said. ‘Why do Armenians keep ...”

“... the world of objects – dust motes, bubbles, a cork, pencils, a piece of hotel notepaper, grapes, green beans, even the sight of a mildly inflamed uvula. (A distasteful glimpse into the depths of an infected mouth is the nearest that Roussel’s writing ever comes to entering the inner world of another person.) Mark Ford is alive to the idiosyncratic nature ...”

“... and the poem is filled with images of questionable military might: Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorise the rest The poems Bishop wrote between her arrival in Key West in 1938 and her move to Brazil more than a decade later are laced with images of violence and warfare. ‘Florida’ begins as though she ...”

“... at other times, oddly well groomed, smiling, fey, in a tight-fitting pantomime costume of bright green and a jaunty hat with a feather. He goes on foot, with a bow slung over his back, greets his compadres in a hearty manner, and is dogged by a stubborn sense of fairness. He has a girlfriend, Marian, but it’s hard to shake off the sense that she’s there ...”

“... book is a document of the way the architects involved saw this process. Keeling House, Bethnal Green Bruno Ahrends, like so many German-Jewish emigrés, was interned at the start of the Second World War as an ‘enemy alien’ – stuck for the duration in Douglas on the Isle of Man. There he created dream images straight out of the unbuilt projects of ...”

“... highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British governor at Colombo, was instructed not to drain the treasury with an unnecessary adventure. But he was ambitious for rank and title, and so found an excuse: King Vikrama, he claimed, had committed acts of barbarism against local ...”

“... he is wholly at home in this world. The three volumes of his biography stand comparison with Robert Caro’s Life of Lyndon Johnson in their ability to show us how power works from the inside. Personal relationships at or near the top matter far more than political posturing. It would probably be wise to remember that in the years ahead.At the same ...”

“... fighting to the last bullet to defend Hitler in his bunker, could emerge as best choice for the Robert Schuman Prize for services to European unity.* Why should European justice too not let bygones be bygones? More generally, appointments to the court had little or nothing to do with juridical qualifications. Nearly all were political. The Belgian judge was ...”

“... been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up sometimes in the 1990s, but I ...”

“... loathed by the general, reporting from Islamabad and asserting that the US Embassy had given the green light to the coup because it regarded the chief justice as a nuisance and wrongly believed him to be ‘a Taliban sympathiser’. Certainly no US spokesperson or State Department adjunct in the Foreign Office criticised the dismissal of the eight Supreme ...”

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nothing but ‘growing threats to the American peace established at the end of the Cold War’, as Robert Kagan, a former State Department official under Reagan, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote in an essay collection called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy, published in 2000, the election ...”

“... for representation they were acknowledging their vice in tacitly paying homage to virtue. In his Green Book, however, Gaddafi scandalised people by his refusal to be a hypocrite: he elevated his rejection of representation into an explicit constitutive principle which he called the State of the Masses. But the real problem was that his new course led Libya ...”