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“... inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe, caricatured in this account with ‘squiggly’ pipes, green velvet frog buttons, leather trousers, jaunty orchestras, country dancing and garden gnomes – by the end of his stay, Cobb found even Viennese clothes-lines ‘frightening’ on account of the long white socks hanging from them. A postwar chapter recounts ...”

“... the material that came out of Wales and Ireland, farms and fishing, men’s work with horses. Like Robert Roberts, another recorder of the lives of the poor born at the end of the last century, Evans grew up in a grocer’s shop – not in the classic slum of Salford, but in the mining valley of Abercynon. The children of shopkeepers in poor working-class ...”

“... not much concerned when son is busted from school for doing the same. In the Seventies, becomes a Green, goes to encounter groups and founds a commune, but living off the land proves less attractive to communards than meditation. He meditates too, and finds God: naturally not the God of any recognised religion, but a bloody-minded God who makes him strike the ...”

“... or daylight description soaks on to the paper easily enough. But down here, in silver-green East Anglia, I am indolentminded, and the mapping out of my delicious colloquies with Edmund seems to be continually postponed.’ He seems to have been very sensitive to the atmosphere in which he wrote: whether this is a virtue in a diarist or a mark of ...”

“... purposes. Still, many a Senior Fellow must have wept to see his college grounds diminished, its green reduced, for the sake of demonstrating that Trinity was indeed an Irish university. But it must be acknowledged that Trinity has made these important changes with every show of good will. Indeed, so far as the question of public relations arises, Trinity ...”

“... outside ourselves of all that is bad in the world and in us. In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil called this process the making of ‘displeasure-images’, and identified it as ‘part of the oldest psychotechnical apparatus mankind possesses’. Together with our tendency to take things figuratively, this is the mechanism which complies with ...”

“... to those to whom the title suggests something as repugnantly exotic as raw ink-fish swallowed with green mustard. I myself find the idealisation of michi (Way) one of the few attitudes to life that redeem our fiercely competitive and achievement-hungry national character. The ideal of a single pursuit, based on the Zen belief that one is many and many are ...”

“... to dwell on the mixture of manners, the ‘tension between the styles’. Everett suggests that Robert Hitchens’s Bella Donna, a bestseller which figures in the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 – a fine English murder – was one of Eliot’s sources, and that he had been reading Gentlemen prefer blondes and Ring Lardner, here described with some ...”

“... that survives precious. Some of the best medieval poems – Beowulf, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – have come down to us in a single manuscript. Four books contain about two-thirds of all surviving Old English poetry, and for a few months in 2018 those four lay side by side in a single (doubtless heavily insured) glass case for an exhibition at ...”

“... was lucky: syphilis did not carry him off in his prime. Consider the 19th-century Scottish surgeon Robert Liston, ‘tall . . . powerful . . . dressed in dark bottle-green coat with velvet collar . . . grey trousers and Wellington boots, thumb stuck in the armhole of his vest . . . chewing a tooth pick’, and famous for ...”

“... in their homeland. One of the lawyers for the Red Army Faction (the Baader-Meinhof gang) is now a Green member of the German parliament, another is the notably illiberal interior minister, a third is Gerhard Schroeder. (In the 1970s, Schroeder defended Horst Mahler, who had himself acted for RAF members and is now a supporter of the far right NDP.) Ulrike ...”

“... he had roles in the elaborate Christmas revels held during Edward’s reign; that he chiefly wore green and his hair was cropped short or shaven; that he had a sister, whom he was permitted to receive; that he died in Shoreditch in 1559, the year of Elizabeth’s coronation; and that he must have been a commoner, given the paucity of records.Somer was a man ...”

“... Mosley was still a Labour MP. Yet Everard Webley, the leader of the British Freemen, in their green uniforms ‘like the male chorus at a musical comedy’, is unmistakeably Mosley, very tall and burly, consumed with ambition and deliberately unpleasant: ‘Many people, he had found, are frightened of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity.’ Nancy ...”

“... make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. The birds evoked in her elegy for Robert Lowell, ‘North Haven’, have no trouble performing their elegiac function: The Goldfinches are back, or others like them, and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song, pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes. More distracting is the ...”

“... sunny day and we sit on the peak and look out over the country, cloud-shadows hanging still on the green bogs and fields. Below us is the isolated Altan Lough, then two other mountains, Aghla More and Muckish, the last named for the Irish for ‘pig’, muck (it looks like a pig’s back). We stare out along the coast to Tory Island, the home of the great ...”