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“... butcher, the writer as sensitive brute. Then, in a small alcove, I saw the parrot. It was bright green and perky-eyed, with its head at an inquiring angle. ‘Psittacus,’ ran the inscription: ‘Parrot borrowed by G. Flaubert from the Museum of Rouen and placed on his work-table during the writing of Un Coeur Simple, where it is called Loulou, the parrot ...”

“... house in Vence in February 1946. On Picasso’s orders, she wore her mauve blouse and ‘willow-green’ slacks – two colours Matisse liked very much. It worked: Matisse took an immediate liking to Gilot, whose eyebrows reminded him of ‘circumflex accents’, and he declared that he would like to make a portrait of her with ...”

“... who claimed to have given every member of the royal family a blowjob’. George Melly or David Sylvester, good listeners and both regulars, might have tuned in a bit more carefully and given us the details. Muriel had many tousled Boswells, but her friends were generally too stocious – even by Boswell’s standards – to write the kinds of memoir ...”

“... the graphics to avoid a law suit. You had to guide a little man around a maze, munching up the green dots and avoiding four ghouls that pursued you. There were four larger, flashing green dots, which would give you the ability for a limited period to munch the ghouls, too. It was culpably simple, and astonishingly ...”

“... at the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, Mowhoush returned home. He showed his wife a green card he had been given: a document, he claimed, that gave him permission to retrieve his detained children from Tiger FOB. (Later, when Mowhoush’s body was released, there was no green card among his effects.) The sons ...”

“... modern art culture – Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Krasner, Hans Hofmann, the sculptor David Smith – which had spent a decade submitting to the master. ‘Aha,’ Gorky is supposed to have said coldly to de Kooning on first being shown the younger artist’s Picasso-saturated work, ‘so you have ideas of your own.’ Picasso’s aren’t good ...”

“... One unfamiliar painting is hard to leave behind. This is the extraordinary picture of King David holding a lira da braccio and looking down on a priest who kneels in prayer before him: a work recognised by Mina Gregori as by Moretto nearly twenty years ago, and which has not been seen in public in Britain for two hundred years. It was once attributed ...”

“... 1977. In that year, two contributors to a Times Literary Supplement survey, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, spoke so highly of her work as to effect a change in this situation. Three more novels by Barbara Pym were published, this time by Macmillan, who finally added to them in 1982 – two years after the writer had herself died – the book originally ...”

“... and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that ...”

“... the United States was committed to this view of the matter well before it gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait. Nor does his exorbitant interpretation of that green light make a settlement of the Palestinian question, or the suddenly-discovered problem of nuclear proliferation, for that matter, any less ...”

“... in his kitchen. He strips off long ribbons of slippery translucent dough and coats them in virgin green olive oil and eats them just as they are. So begins a short story whose insouciance and quirky eroticism enchanted me in 1992 when I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and ...”

“... wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write ...”

“... overboard into the North Pacific. Among the lost cargo were 28,800 plastic bath toys: red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks. A year later, hundreds of the things began washing up on the islands around Sitka, Alaska, and amateur beachcombers practising the imperfect science of driftology started mapping the path of the toys as they floated the ...”

“... when Percy was the most successful tragedy of the time, and her closest friends were the actor David Garrick and his wife, Eva, was the cause of some dismay to sober-minded Evangelicals. But Roberts had an answer to that. He was not offering ‘a perfect specimen of Christianity’, but an account of a heroic triumph: More had mixed with the society ...”

“... logs used as drums’, to the impact on book business, eons hence, of ‘the global village green … undisciplined, polymorphous and polyglot, as has been our fate and our milieu ever since the divine autocracy showed its muscle by toppling the monolingual Tower of Babel’. And yet, for all the grandeur of these moments, Epstein’s perspective will ...”