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“... people saw in the ‘Yes’ campaign. Instead, they were trying to get things back to normal.When David Cameron emerged from 10 Downing Street after the referendum to announce a policy of ‘English votes for English laws’, the scales tipped. One of Bennie et al’s interviewees recalls that Cameron ‘thought Scotland was back in its box. We remembered ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”

“... passion. For the English department at Upper St Clair High School, however, the writing of David Halberstam, Norman Mailer, Larry King and Marshall Frady, to name just a handful of the Morris Boys, was considered precocious troublemaking, and duly expelled from class as stylistically, politically and just about every other way-ally unfit for ...”

“... another socialist doctor, Leslie Haden Guest, who later became a Labour MP. Her second husband, David Eder, also a doctor, ‘was one of the first English medical men to fall under the influence of Freud’ and to disseminate his ideas. A Zionist of the mild kind, he envisaged a Jewish State as part of the British Empire. The Eders’ house was ‘a meeting ...”

“... recruiting other proxies, such as Israel and Iraq, though with little success. Giving Israel the green light to destroy the PLO led to the Lebanon debacle in 1982. Cynically supporting Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against the mullahs in Tehran led to pointless slaughter. Each of these episodes opened a door through which US forces entered the ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... spiral tops of the pines are loaded with ripening seed, and the sun gives a glow to their light green tinge, which is changing into purple, one tree more or less advanced, contrasting with another. The profusion with which nature has decked them, with pendant honours, prevents all surprise at seeing, in every crevice, some sapling struggling for ...”

“... where the armrest meets the seat. She is wearing a black wool jumper decorated with horizontal green stripes, and a black velvet skirt. The textures of the materials are astonishingly conveyed. The thorns on the stem of the rose that Kitty is holding up to her alarmed face are needle-sharp – you can sense their sharpness, and how risky it was to hold the ...”

“... In January, I sat in the military airport in Kuwait staring at razor wire, tents, humvees and a green plastic portaloo and wondered what it would feel like to land back in Baghdad. I boarded a noisy military transport plane and flew to a gravel wasteland surrounded by razor wire, humvees and brown portaloos. Only the sand in the wind indicated I was in ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the ...”

“... without a national security crisis that investment is liable to be insufficient to kick-start a green revolution. Instead, fracking fuels faith in the idea that the next time innovation is needed to bail the country out, it will. That’s wishful thinking. Third, many of those who believe in the redemptive powers of fracking don’t pooh-pooh the ...”

“... of that old nightmare that Californians are wasting the last drops of water by keeping bright green lawns and turquoise pools. Far more water goes on agriculture than on residential use – and, despite intermittent droughts, the Sierra and the Rockies have enough snow water to keep the whole thing going. Indefinitely? We don’t know. But who knows those ...”

“... difficulty, but he did not fully resolve it, even implicitly. Roughly, I know what ‘That tree is green’ means by knowing, among other things, what ‘is green’ means; but my knowledge of what ‘is green’ means consists in my knowing what it means to say, of any specific ...”