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“... 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 ...”

“... a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... back in the 1920s on the morning of her party, Clarissa Dalloway is mending a tear in her green dress. It is a favourite dress. It would be anyone’s favourite dress because it is both distinctive and yet suitable: it is one of the ‘little out of the way things’ that Mrs Dalloway’s dressmaker, Sally Parker, could create and yet at the same time ...”

“... The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... most origin stories, this one is too telling to be entirely true; it has a frisson, as the critic David Sylvester put it, ‘at once Oedipal and necrophilic’. Although Magritte wasn’t present at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a recurrent avatar of the artist, stands by a ...”

“... liberal internationalism’ have come from an older cadre of conservatives. John Mearsheimer and David Hendrickson are both outcasts from the American right, both teach political science in the Midwest and both have opposed every US military intervention since the end of the Cold War. They believe that the US ought to have emerged from it as a chastened ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...”