“... never wrote as a ship, ‘a veritable three-decker out of chosen and long-stored timber – teak, green-heart, and ten-year-old oak knees – each curve melting deliciously into the next ...’ Sillitoe’s evidently well-informed portrayal of The Lost Flying Boat goes beyond the reminiscences of the former member of the RAFVR, who has done his homework, and ...”

“... knew of none that would make much difference. (In this book, Patrick Cockburn concludes that Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year still offers the soundest advice for those caught in epidemics: run away.) But although this was not Cork’s first epidemic, it was the most vicious. The death toll seems to have been relatively low, as it usually is ...”

“... progressive activists. ‘Both parties do the same thing, one covertly, one overtly,’ he told a Green Party gathering in 2001. ‘Which one is going to get more people mad? Which one is going to get more people organised?’ The questions depend on a familiar leftist cliché – the worse things get, the better they get. But if Nader’s dismissal of the ...”

“... feeling a bit seasick and discovered that all the postboxes and telephone booths had been painted green. But in those pre-euro days the shops still accepted ordinary money, and my mother used to say that what she liked best about the place, apart from the Mary O’Hara records, was that with its bumpy single-track roads and straying donkeys it reminded her of ...”

“... such as Michel Rocard and Charles Pasqua, Mario Soares, formerly Prime Minister of Portugal, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the most celebrated soixantehuitard of all. Troops of British Tories displaced at the 1997 general election have found it a convenient refuge while other politicians use it as a way of supporting their ongoing projects elsewhere: Jean-Marie Le ...”

“... were exempt.) More to the point, he preferred to spend his money feeding what his friend Daniel Halévy called his ‘great and terrible passion’ of collecting. At the lower end, his eye was caught by printed calico headdresses and traditional Normandy handkerchiefs, up through Gavarni prints (of which he had two thousand or so by the time he ...”

“... murder of a Palestinian leader in Amman would be sure to fuel speculation that Mossad had got the green light, and perhaps some helpful tips, from Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID). This was no way to treat a friend – at least not one you respected – and the Israelis knew it. Unlike the flamboyant assassinations of the PFLP spokesman ...”

“... so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash muddily into the green Atlantic. I am thinking of favourite walks, or rather favourite places to sit when out walking, like the confluence of the Nidd and the Ouse at Nun Monkton near York, or of the streamlet behind our local pub and the River Wye, where sometimes at twilight ...”

“... eskimo in his igloo, the bedouin in his tent or the Englishman in his semi really lust for deep green marble floors, Tiffany glassware, five-foot-wide walnut staircases, private lifts and faux-Sheraton cabinets that roll back to reveal television screens. But the zest of Wolfe’s depiction of modern times arises in largest part from his endearingly ...”

“... apart at school. Many of the boys’ earliest memories were of palling around with senators like Daniel Inouye and Jesse Helms. They mowed lawns together and worked at a cold-storage warehouse, where Beau managed the deliveries and Hunter unloaded trucks. At high school Beau was called ‘the sheriff’ because he kept people in line in a friendly ...”

“... my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness of the red tiles, the yellow-edged green of cactus-leaves, the brilliance of bougainvillaea creeper. It is probably not too romantic to say that that was when my novel Midnight’s Children was really born: when I realised how much I wanted to restore the past to myself, not in the faded greys of ...”

“... we’re supposing to be an illusion – can’t exist unless there really is experience. Daniel Dennett tries this move. He proposes that ‘there is no such thing’ as phenomenology: ‘There seems to be phenomenology … but it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology.’ In fact it does ...”

“... with the teleprompter and grinning weirdly at random moments. Standing in front of a hideous green backdrop, he looked, as one blogger wrote, like the cottage cheese on a lime Jello salad. Apparently no longer an officer and a gentleman, he took the occasion of this extraordinary moment in American history not to congratulate the first African-American ...”

“... for back-up, Tensing pulls in behind DuBose, who has stopped his car on Rice St, a pleasant green road outside the university campus. Tensing walks to the car, and the men have a seemingly amiable conversation. The officer is insistent but polite, DuBose vague and indistinct (at one point, he hands over a small bottle of gin). Tensing, addressing DuBose ...”

“... obeyed by his corporate and intelligence allies, to ‘make the Chilean economy scream.’ (As Daniel Ellsberg’s wife commented when she first saw the Pentagon papers, the American authorities in those days were fond of using ‘the language of torturers’.) So that when the Chilean Armed Forces came out of their barracks in September 1973, and began ...”