“... was to remain unchanged in the future. The falklands war concentrated British minds. As Goose Green had shown, defence is an inescapable duty of sovereignty. Where the mighty United States could not defend South Vietnam, Britain had neither the hope nor the heart for tiny Hong Kong. No British governmenthas ever intended to offer refuge to more than a few ...”

“... tourists love, just as there’s a head of Joyce, which no one much looks at, in St Stephen’s Green. When Nora stood Joyce up on 14 June, he wrote to her ardently, demanding another date. They met on 16 June, which is when their story began, and when Ulysses both began and ended. Lucky it wasn’t on Good Friday, when the pubs are closed. I wonder if the ...”

“... Yet if, like Melanie Phillips, you believe Islamic banking in the UK merely hastens the day when a green flag is raised over Westminster, it’s important to think of ‘usury’ in the later sense, in order to insist that Muslim law is either deluded or deceitful: ‘The whole issue of sharia finance,’ Phillips wrote last year, ‘is based on a fabrication ...”

“... is about 8500 square miles. About a third of the corn is supposed to be for ethanol, the not very green alternative to petroleum, so you can see the Gulf being throttled by a pair of energy-economy hands. Inland are the refineries and chemical plants that have given a swathe of the region the nickname Cancer Alley.Louisiana is in many ways a semi-tropical ...”

“... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you ...”

“... writhing in the throes of a midlife crisis and sexual combat (‘What do [women] want? They eat green salad and drink human blood’), composes feverish letters to current lovers and dead philosophers – was a landmark moment in the power-lifting of Jewish-American fiction. ‘Over the past ten or 15 years,’ Julian Moynihan announced in the New York ...”

“... when he slipped away from his protection officers, or made public appearances in a less-than-slick green suit his media handlers had banned him from wearing. Eventually, his capacity for compromise on principle – however small – seemed to vanish. The contrast with McDonnell, made in both books, is instructive: his only question for potential allies was ...”

“... aren’t up to the task: he especially has it in for wind, quoting the dismaying statistic from David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air that a four-kilometre-wide belt of offshore windfarms all the way round the coast of Britain would provide less than an eighth of Britons’ average daily energy consumption (according to ...”

“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”

“... Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of a growing gay readership, gay sections can be found in most bookshop chains, and independent gay ...”

“... And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the ...”

“... mighty depths below. Clare is thought of as a marginal, provincial poet, who inhabited a remote green world of heath, woodland, riverbank and marshland, but Bate draws attention to the richness of the cultural life around him. Stamford, to the northwest of Helpston, just over the county border into Lincolnshire, was no backwater. Books were published ...”

“... asked by the Foreign Office to become the United Kingdom’s special representative on Cyprus. Sir David – now Lord – Hannay, who began his career in Iran and Afghanistan, was Britain’s foremost European diplomat, with some thirty years of involvement in EU affairs behind him. His summons came from Jeremy Greenstock, soon to become famous for his ...”

“... Turning the monkey caps to the left they could see the lobby, part of the bar, and most of the green salon beyond it. Before their noses were the stairs, the two elevators, and the telephone booths … These spies told the police what people ate and for how much and with whom, who came to see them and how long they stayed, what they said … If there was ...”

“... all credit for higher growth to lower inequality would be foolish: postwar reconstruction, the green revolution, the Cold War boom in armaments and the flood of petroleum all contributed to the surge. But did the compression of incomes play no significant role? Marx suggested and Keynes took pains to argue that a top-heavy income distribution can hamper ...”