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“... church was decked with holme, ivie, bayes, and whatever the season of the year afforded to be green.’ Medieval poets and painters depicted the nativity scene full of flowers and April breezes; it was inconceivable that such a day could be bleak. It took a more sentimental age to romanticise the dark and cold (perhaps because they were further away from ...”

“... Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She was influenced by the work of the American painter Robert Henri, who had founded the Ashcan School – a movement that championed gritty depictions of urban scenes. ‘I didn’t want to be taught Impressionism,’ Neel explained. ‘I didn’t see life as Picnic on the Grass. I wasn’t happy like Renoir.’ Her ...”

“... from the Latin for ‘calling’. Some poets still take it literally. ‘There is a language green and aeon-deep; Edened,’ Camille Ralphs writes in After You Were, I Am (Faber, £12.99). She wants to take us from ‘Genesis to English’, plumbing the ‘damb grammars of creation’, ‘those dreams of earth fluoressing/from some primal noun’. The ...”

“... the blinding flash of the first atomic explosion revealed their labours had not been in vain.J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the Manhattan Project and hence ‘father of the atomic bomb’, was never openly remorseful. But he was nothing if not ambivalent, as Ray Monk makes clear in his superb biography. When the fireball burst Oppenheimer ...”

“... and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his son’s arrested political development brings him back to the quarrels of a previous generation. Many people are liberated by the death of a dominant parent: Horace felt the full burden of his past only when ...”

“... to Moscow’: The Emperor Nap he would set off On a summer excursion to Moscow; The fields were green, and the sky was blue, Morbleu! Parbleu! What a pleasant excursion to Moscow! It is hard to feel grim about the man who wrote this. As Storey rightly says, it cannot have been what his government patrons had in mind. Southey’s popular poetry was simply ...”

“... Film Festival in 1962) and screenwriter: his credits include Downhill Racer (1969), starring Robert Redford as a champion skier. His novel about mountaineering, Solo Faces (1979), started life as a script for Redford. As well as subsidising some unprofitable novels, the movie business brought Salter into contact with a more hedonistic world: he spent ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... of all nations, has bowed down lowest in his presence. The ‘24-carat taste buds’ belong to Robert Parker, a 57-year-old former Baltimore lawyer, who started the bimonthly subscription-only Wine Advocate in 1978, and whose many books on the world’s wines – Bordeaux, The Wines of the Rhône Valley and Provence (1987) and various editions of the ...”

“... on Gliding and Soaring, which was a translation of the reminiscences of the German pioneer Robert Kronfeld, but although it provides an interesting account of the early development of gliding, it stops at the threshold of the really outstanding progress of the next twenty years.On Being a Bird is largely a descriptive book, with some charming attempts ...”

“... Patty began by setting up Sunday schools in a number of villages near their cottage at Cowslip Green in Somerset, following the well-known examples of Robert Raikes in Gloucestershire and Sarah Trimmer in Brentford. Patty kept a journal of the years 1789-99, published as Mendip Annals in 1859 and clearly intended for ...”

“... hot, sunny day with a heat haze over the beech and oak woods, the cornfields still freshly green and the river gleaming among the willows. The Evenlode valley rivals the Windrush for first place in Oxfordshire’s beloved countryside. It was at its best, before the summer has scorched its green fields and dulled the ...”

“... no British novels that, like Catch 22, approach war as lunacy made real, or implicitly ask, like Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, why running dope is worse than killing unarmed Vietnamese. Such a mixture of the macabre and the grotesque with a touch of anarchy is not a British vein. There are extraordinary figures in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour ...”

“... a diving bell project in Cornwall. He established a civet cat business in his home on Newington Green, collecting and selling the animals’ perineal secretions for the manufacture of perfume. It is not quite the milieu of Fielding or Pope. It was rumoured that he kept a set of ropes and ladders handy should the debt collector come to call. His creditors ...”

“... in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by several serious poets (Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Ed Dorn are those who come to mind) – that the North American imagination is beginning to define its identity no longer on a West-East axis, across the Atlantic to ...”