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“... your journal as ‘slick, like a scar in velvet’. As for why rain works round her, or how things green when she moves among them, or what music hangs in the air, these things must remain, as always, her secret, as must the true tale of the love of her life, who saw her exactly as you see her now, and took her kiss and changed, so we’re told, in a moment ...”

“... beauty’. In Man and Boy Cyd and Harry attended an awards ceremony where Cyd wore ‘a green cheongsam in Chinese silk – high-necked, tight as a second skin, the greatest dress I have ever seen in my life’. In One for My Baby Jackie and Alfie attend a dinner party, where Jackie wears ‘some western designer’s idea of a cheongsam. It’s ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... like you tear us apart.’ Then there was the meta-kerfuffle that attended the attempt by the Green leader, Natalie Bennett, to launch her party’s manifesto. She came unstuck during an interview with Nick Ferrari on LBC, during which she started spluttering and coughing to cover up her inability to answer a question about how she would fund a commitment ...”

“... the truth about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying’, Philip Green gave a self-congratulatory interview to the Guardian. Swaggering through his high-street stores, journalist in tow, he showed off his knowledge of the stock, his attention to product display, his grace while accepting customers’ compliments, and his ...”

“... this random throw of the bones, this coming together; it’s there in the music, there in the grey-green weather. Coming together too soon if not too late. He earns his bacon and beans with a coat or two of paint on the barn, or by cutting and stacking live oak for the stove. Remember the freckle of sweat along the faint line of down on her lip when she sits ...”

“... various modern scholars and writers, makes an impressive list. The best place to start – as David Stuttard does in his new biography – is family background. For all its democratic politics, Athenian society was intensely class-conscious. Although Alcibiades was a product of that complex network of upper-crust intermarried families which produced most ...”

“... push the court into the public eye than abortion. In Britain abortion was legalised as a result of David Steel’s Abortion Bill of 1967, but in the US abortion rights have never had democratic legitimacy of this kind, resting instead on the 7-2 decision reached by nine male judges in Roe v. Wade (1973). The justices managed to establish abortion rights in the ...”

“... in sunlight, that flare is the flare in her eye, that rising note in my ear the singing deep in green branches, that low rumble her blood at a rolling boil; and what she screams from the centre, now, as her hair goes up in a rush, as her fingers char, as the spit on her tongue bubbles and froths, as she browns from heel to head, as she cracks and splits, as ...”

“... down it. Was it a relic of old woodcraft or a necessary drain? It was Wooden Waterway (1978) by David Nash. What delighted me was the slender pour of the translucent water, and the way the thing looked almost like an accident of nature, a fallen sapling become a duct. A little further on, perched on a pair of ‘goalposts’ straddling a dip in the track ...”

“... dazzle, so I couldn’t tell if the hare became a man or that bugaboo lurched up from the deeper green to head me off, a dead one for sure, with his eyes like peeled eggs and his mossy smile. He took me at the elbow and barged the tide, towing me out half a mile or more, then down to darker water – just enough light to show a four-masted ship canted ...”

“... sophisticated thinking of a later age: for Herodotus the struggle is to retrieve actual facts. As David Branscome writes in Textual Rivals, ancient critics ‘found fault with Herodotus precisely at those times when they felt he did not live up to his perceived promise of delivering the truth’. It was no easy business for him: the real achievement of the ...”

“... There you have it. Oh, and on one of the corbels a bee in flight, flanked by a jack-in-the-green and a manticore. They swarmed in heavy weather, low-slung and singing. Light touched the apostles window as they found their way down the transept and past the rood screen, then rose to the crucifix taking hold on the Man of Sorrows, his tallow flesh, until ...”

“... texts as unlike each other, and as unlike Emma, as Pilgrim’s Progress and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. No one’s arguing about Emma. But Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegorical dream-vision; while Green Mansions (a story set in the forests of western Guyana featuring a female spirit-presence, a lost tribe, and ...”

“... David Thomson​ is best known for a series of surveys of the history of cinema as Olympian in scope as they are in evenness of tone, the most notable being his indispensable Biographical Dictionary of Film from 1975, subsequently updated in a series of editions as the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His latest book, The Fatal Alliance, is every bit as commanding in its succinct description and analysis of a wide variety of films, good, bad and (mostly) indifferent ...”