“... four are by Richard Usborne, the king of the traditional Wodehouse buffs. The other is by Benny Green, the new broom. Oxford University and the Pierpont Morgan Library are both relevant to Wodehouse’s life. He did not attend a university, though he would have liked to: but he has been much honoured by Oxford men. ‘Auctor magicus,’ chanted the Public ...”

“... the short term. We are all guilty of existence and our sheer numbers make us enemies of the good green earth. Ben Elton dabbled in these waters in Stark, and, despite the jokes, there is no reason to believe that he or Hiaasen think humans are capable of much enlightened self-interest. So, while there are plenty of human deaths and maimings in Hiaasen’s ...”

“... bright colour. Geological maps, marbled with the laminar streaks of sedimentary rocks in yellow, green and brown and sprinkled with the great red plums of granite, have always been strident. There are none of those here, but there are examples of topographical maps overpainted with emphatic information of other sorts. In one, Second World War bomb damage is ...”

“... on the padded lid of the box in the middle of the canvas: a blue that could look pink one day, green the next. Matisse tried everything he could think of to pin down the secret of this painting, using a magnifying glass, studying the texture, the grain of the canvas, the glazes, the objects themselves and the transitions from light to shade . . . He even ...”

“... sustenance from maize roots and threatens food production in sub-Saharan Africa. It has bright green leaves. Truly dependent parasites, which have no need to metabolise for themselves and therefore no need for chlorophyll, are sickly pale. The stems of dodder twine around the host in thick tangles of cream threads. The flowers of broomrape emerge from the ...”

“... improvements which sent forty thousand or so foreign volunteers to fight in Spain. George Green, who went with his wife, wrote to his mother explaining why they were there just a few weeks before he was killed on the Ebro:We came to war because we love peace and hate war . . . Fascism can be decisively beaten in Spain & if it is beaten in Spain then ...”

“... always like that for him,’ the child mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout ...”

“... building, looking like a restaurant kitchen, the fliers and hurried posters pinned to its punished green door like patrons’ orders. And, walking along that main street, pale, reticent Northerners. The regular daily exchange between acquaintances is a wary glance, and a swift, simultaneous ‘OK?’, the word being both question and its own answer. It always ...”

“... who in a Stanley Fishy way has simply asserted his right to authenticate? Floreat emptor. Or as Peter Carey ends his new novel, ‘How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?’ Theft: A Love Story, is about just such issues of authenticity and fraudulence in the international art world. As he did in his last novel, My Life as a ...”

“... of the lights of a town; the stars themselves in a sky which runs from pink on the horizon through green to blue; the light from the windows behind us on the snow: all add to the feeling his pictures often give that one has arrived at a significant moment. The late pictures look as if they have been painted quickly, with a kind of urgent carelessness. When you ...”

“... been a later addition: the resemblance to other Botticellis of the 1470s was established, with the green in the angels’ draperies identified as coming from a source of malachite that had provided pigments for other Italian paintings of the period. An infrared reflectogram (which makes the under-drawing visible) showed that the painter had had trouble with ...”

“... The east side is presided over by the now rather dishevelled pomp of the Russell Hotel (pointed green-topped towers and high-piled much decorated walls in terracotta and brick); the concrete zig-zag of the Imperial Hotel next door drags meanly down Southampton Row; the pastiche Georgian of the university buildings on the west side are broken by the entrance ...”

“... come from a Book of Hours. Not all the skills of Japan could make the roses as pink, the leaves as green, the lilies as golden, the tulips, cornflowers and irises so much in their true colours, even on her pale skin. A gentleman and a painter then, but more properly a ‘limner’, a painter of works in watercolour. The best-known limner was Nicholas ...”

“... It’s a serious book festival in a small town in Galloway, with a large screen on the village green, marquees in the school playground and a pop-up bar in the local garage. Our stand was beside people selling honey and pottery, and since we were only selling the chance to be part of our research there wasn’t much interest at first. I tried to get some ...”

“... The Allotment’ returns from war to find that he must choose between ‘an England, profitlessly green’ and a landscape where           slag in lavafolds rolls beneath him. The first part of the poem seems to be spoken to the man in his allotment, but, immediately after remarking on a bitterness ‘rooted in your silence’, the second-person ...”