“... up under Peel in 1842. This was one important suggestion to Charles Dickens for his portrait of Daniel Doyce, inventor-victim of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. The other was Babbage’s readiness, in both senses, with his hands, which yielded the Doyce thumb: ‘a certain free use of the thumb that is never seen but in a hand accustomed to ...”

“... her curtain, or Isabel Archer reading in that little Albany office with its windows covered in green paper, or Ursula Brangwen reading Tennyson in her room at Cossethay. The story of women reading can’t be told as if it only connected women in a sociological and political progress across the centuries. Women readers have also led the journey inwards, to ...”

“... In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East Centre at St ...”

“... has suggested that we look at the brain and ask how we would make an instrument like that. So has Daniel Dennett. But for Rose, the question is simply historical: observe as best we can, with a bit of imagination, how simple, slightly brainy creatures evolved into increasingly complex systems. Not just humans, and not just mammals: observe how different ...”

“... she was 16, she was long accustomed to managing and protecting those around her. Like William, Daniel Gibbens was a graduate of Harvard Medical School; and as a young child in Weymouth, Massachusetts, Alice had accompanied her father on his rounds – a routine she apparently loved, and which made for an early intimacy with sickness and death. Both ...”

“... the light), and his features approximated from dirty pinks in mould-like patches on grey-green. Or consider Rue Notre Dame des Champs, a night-time street scene (unusual among Sickert’s paintings in being Parisian). The ground colour is a light purple. The architecture has been sketched in – a barber’s shop bulges in the foreground, its shape ...”

“... two discrete English gardens: buttercups and daisies, sunsets and psalms, moors and briars.Another Green World (1975) is my favourite Eno LP. (Prince loved it too, apparently.) Gently experimental and warmly formal, it is full of things which later evaporate from Eno’s work: joy, humour, sex. Tracks like ‘Everything Merges with the Night’, ‘I’ll Come ...”

“... readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue. The magazine’s classified ads offered an eclectic menu of ‘professional ...”

“... words of Miss La Creevy in his novel. In 1839 he was able to admire his own glamorous portrait by Daniel Maclise, which was engraved for use as the frontispiece of Nicholas Nickleby when it appeared as a book in October that year. But there is no evidence that Dickens ever turned left on entering the portico and strolled around the National Gallery. He would ...”

“... and electorates in wealthy countries trying to reconcile the irreconcilable goals of cheap green energy, free trade and secure, well-paid green energy jobs for their own workers. There’s something more unsettling involved too: an inspiring, utopian, internationalist movement to save humanity from climate emergency ...”

“... the excellent multi-author collection Aids: The Burden of History, edited by Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox; Dennis Altman’s Aids and the New Puritanism. To the extent that Sontag’s essay links with those discussions and with the pleas you can read every week in liberal newspapers and journals – pleas against moralism and bigotry, pleas for ...”

“... slightly mad. Perhaps all diarists expose a sort of madness in themselves. The diary of raving-mad Daniel Pratt, Dandiprat’s Days, is a source of surprisingly innocent merriment – for Pratt’s sort of madness would seem to be no laughing matter. He is a senior civil servant, a wealthy bachelor of 54 who has never made love to a woman; every now and then ...”

“... community, agreed on the essential questions of common life, deeply rooted in its past and in its green and pleasant land. From E.M. Forster (‘in these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole’) to Stanley Baldwin (‘England is the country and the country is England’), this vision has helped shape 20th-century ...”

“... not least Freud’s, Kitty is remarkably covered up; she wears a jumper with ribbed neck and green contoured stripes, and a voluptuous velvet skirt. But Freud’s meticulous naturalism and the translucence of his flesh tones lend an almost indecent air of exposure to the portrait. It’s easy to see why critics have interpreted Girl with Roses as a ...”

“... every anonymous work sends us off in search of an author. Finding out who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight might deepen our understanding of the poem, but it might prove no more enlightening than finding out who bolted down the final rivet on the Forth Bridge. There are literary works in which what speaks is less a personal voice than a set of ...”