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“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”

“... to 1953 and is set in rural Mississippi, a landscape of baked clay and shacks with cinder yards. David, the hero-narrator, grows up an only child in redneck poverty. His shiftless father drifts from job to job, beats his wife and lets David get beaten up by young thugs his own age. The family are ostracised by respectable ...”

“... showing through a clarity of primrose. And here is Hemingway, writing in 1929: The fields were green and there were small green shoots on the vines, the trees along the road had small leaves and a breeze came from the sea. I saw the town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains ...”

“... after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In ...”

“... a hiccup in the price mechanism. This, in a nutshell, is Nordhaus’s argument in The Spirit of Green. He also provides brief, superficial and cherry-picked overviews of ‘green’ ethics, political theory and politics, but the book engages with only a tiny sample of the ideas in these fields. It refers almost ...”

“... pledging that they will not cease from mental fight until they have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. So many Jerusalems. It may well be better for your sanity to take one of these journeys than to make a pilgrimage to the place itself. The city of Jerusalem is notorious for inducing the Jerusalem Syndrome, which currently reduces around ...”

“... of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come back and decide, rather doubtfully, that they must have been golden orioles. However Kate M. tells me that they were probably parakeets, which are spreading rapidly in London (a large ...”

“... when I see the assistant gazing in horror at my hands, the fingers stained the virulent yellowish green I’ve been sponging on during this last week. As a young man my father smoked quite heavily and his fingers were stained like this by cigarettes – and a nice brown it was, and one which I wouldn’t mind seeing on the wall; if he were alive still and the ...”

“... Such donnish tolerance was rare. The most ferocious analyst of his immaturity was probably David Holbrook, whose account of Thomas’s ‘infantile egocentricity’ in Llareggub Revisited (1962) represents a high-water mark of Leavisite moralism. Thomas shows ‘an impotence of language belonging to an impotence in living’, Holbrook said, and quoted ...”

“... having lived long enough to see another Conservative enter Downing Street. That prime minister, David Cameron, wanted to give her a full state funeral, putting her on the same level as Churchill. She vetoed the idea. So she was given a full ceremonial funeral instead, which placed her on a par with the Queen Mother and Princess Diana, though she received ...”

“... of the day will be able to pursue. The call for massive infrastructural investment – a green new deal? – will be louder than ever. But we may be forced back instead on the technologies we already know, deferring our zero carbon targets, or merely ignoring them, leaving fossil fuel consumption at the centre of the story. Either ...”

“... poet of organic life, growth and decay, and particularly of wood and lumber and mulch, of red and green and brown leaves. Of ‘a house eats up the wood that made it,’ of ‘We live, two trees,’ of ‘the leaves light up, still green, this afternoon,/and burn to frittered reds,’ of ‘the mind, which is also ...”

“... Department such as exists in Australia – to second-guess the lead department. The Treasury’s Green Paper on public expenditure and taxation over the next ten years seems to me a contribution to a more open and better-informed debate in this field, though it does not go as far as some would like. There also appears to be a new system of programme ...”

“... patrician of next-century information capitalism, Gates has been talking to everyone, including David Letterman, about what the future – guided by Microsoft, its controlling partner – has in store. With his transformation into a Third Wave Pollyanna, Chairman Bill is sounding remarkably like Speaker Newt, and his new book The Road Ahead has much in ...”