“... where a few tons of rotten rock and clay slid down to spill over the road.Houses speckle the steep green hills around the harbour more thickly than they did in the past, because pieces of land so close to vertical that you would not trust yourself to scramble down them are now built on, as are plots perched on the fault scarp itself. Houses are tucked in or ...”

“... From Regent’s Park and St James’s Park you see newly painted stucco gleam through the green. Before he became George IV’s favourite architect, Nash was a pioneer of the picturesque: houses with Gothick crenellations and groups of ornamental thatched cottages. Regent’s Park is also an exercise in the art of making a false ...”

“... Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund HallFor E.M.Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted stones deckledand foxed with lichen-rings of shaggy galaxies.In flocks you beckonme to read shallow-graven names on time-thumbed tomes ...”

“... paths of others in search of Open Houses, recognisable as much by their determined walk as by the green cover of the guidebook they held. It is an excellent scheme, particularly revealing in the case of buildings of the last 150 years, which often achieve their best effects in unpredictable atriums, entrances and, when function demands it, interiors of ...”

“... that a pink horse or a blue one was once thought to be risible. Areas of unmixed red, blue, green and yellow take on a life of their own, as the gilded backgrounds and blue cloaks of medieval madonnas do, or the pure colours of Indian miniatures. Bring one of his pictures to mind and it is often a patch of strong colour that you remember first: the ...”

“... to Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower – is close by, surrounded by trees and a tiny, green churchyard. It was all very quiet, rather slow and ...”

“... these are read over a background of watercolour in rectangles which pale from a dark green border to a cream centre. In these drawings, and others in which perspectives of box-like structures run off into the distance, transparent watercolour builds up overlapping areas, wash by wash. When overlaps are made on a rectangular grid, patterns like ...”

“... a brush, and the swirls and curlicues in seven main colours – pink, red, black, blue, yellow, green, white – are given space to breathe. At this point a Pollock canvas is still teeming with allusions and serendipitous depictions. Look at the canvas approximately two-thirds across moving left to right, and at mid-height you will see one of many faces ...”

“... the field to the upper left, we soon discover a pink glow that emerges between the yellow and the green, which appears to be a strange colour, albeit in a very different way from the vermilion.’ This quality of strangeness is defined obliquely: ‘It is difficult to describe the effects of colour accurately; let it suffice to say that the vermilion looks ...”

“... threshing and billowing in the wind on the steep Wellington hills, like a speeded up movie of dark green storm clouds. I watched them from the deck of the Picton ferry, keeping track of familiar places which diminished and disappeared as the ship crossed the harbour and headed out past the heads before turning west across Cook Strait. The last time I left the ...”

“... concerns at the time, late 2007-early 2008, about everything from class and turbo-consumerism to green politics and intellectual snobbery.’ You can’t just look at it; you must read it too. Paintings and illustrated books usually have an optimum viewing distance; you may peer at details but most of the time you choose a position that takes in the ...”

“... trails, spread out before my windows smooth, motionless as it were, between the variegated green shores. Farther away it was contracted between two monstrous headlands, and, darkling, set itself against and disappeared behind a confused pile of mountains, clouds and glaciers. The discordant presence of the English tourists becomes central to the story ...”

“... is so similar in its elements – naked figures, warmish in colour, holding hands against a green hill with a blue sky above – that it is hard to believe there is no connection with the Matisse. It is even signed and dated in similar script in the same corner. The effect, however, is utterly different. The blond boy’s girlish face, the black-haired ...”

“... idling. Like the new movie itself, we have our memories, and Tobey Maguire is still with us as Peter Parker, the goofiness wearing a little thin, but the earnestness holding up (in Spider-Man 2 the woman Peter loves appears in a Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest), and he does something very few ...”

“... android who makes cups of tea, learns ancient languages and models his diction and appearance on Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. A clip from that film, with the android devotedly watching it, is included for our information, and a little later the android, out of the spaceship and on the alien planet, rather smugly quotes his favourite lines: ‘There ...”