“... addressed him hours Before he would have dared; the deaf girl too Seemed to expect him at the green chateau; The meal was laid, the guest room full of flowers.This lists a succession of quotidian things, at once banal and yet pregnant with meaning. The tone is studiedly neutral, like a case study, but the atmosphere is wholly magical, like a tale of ...”

“... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder ...”

“... who even managed his turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, on the night he green-lighted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. ‘Cool comedian and quiet commander,’ as Adam Gopnik described him then. The idea that his gifts could have taken him in many directions gives Obama a distinct sense of unease, the feeling that nothing is ...”

“... collaborators (which Camus supported) and the execution of fascist sympathisers such as the writer Robert Brasillach (which he opposed). With the start of the Cold War, the always precarious alliance between the communist and non-communist left was beginning to crumble. Camus was fretting, too, about his native Algeria, ‘pacified’ by the army after a ...”

“... capitalisation required. It was a serious thing, trying to be a writer. My ex-boyfriend, Robert, had just won a national book contest. When I first saw David, he was kneeling next to Robert’s chair, looking up at him. I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed. But David noticed me in a different ...”

“... of the puzzlement felt on this score in London,’ records the leading scholar of the subject, Robert Holland: ‘It remains … a notable fact that it was the British who, in the first instance, had to screw the Turks up to a pitch of excitement about Cyprus, not the other way round.’1 When the requisite excitement eventually came, London did not flinch ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the history of the Civil War right – whatever that might mean – or by tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee across the South. The 2400 miles of Route 66, America’s most famous highway, pass through only one state in the former Confederacy, Texas. Yet in 1936 the first edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book ...”