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“... a Brecht musical’. Maturity is less glossy: he arrived at rehearsals for The Hard Problem in a green tweed jacket and orange socks.Stoppard has talked of putting on Englishness ‘like a coat’ when he arrived as an eight-year-old. A more sentimental biographer might have colluded in the suggestion that the coat could be shrugged off: that only underneath ...”

“... crews were dogged by superstitious prohibitions; no woman was let on board, and the colour green was taboo, as was any mention or depiction of pigs, or rabbits. The taboos were commensurate with the danger. Hardie’s other grandfather died in a U-boat attack in 1939. In 1998 Hardie lost a boat in a freak sea, though he and his crew were rescued. Off ...”

“... did not edit the Bannatyne Manuscript. It was edited by his colleague in the Court of Session, Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, whose Annals led Sir Walter Scott to laud him as ‘the restorer of Scottish history’. Does it matter that the notorious cry of ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ greeted Home’s tragedy in London, not Edinburgh? It ...”

“... Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about exiled people: characters in ...”

“... like ‘the rummage/and shuck of the waves’; ‘The nubbed leaves/come away/in a tease of green.’ Robertson is fond of describing actions with paired verbs – rabbits ‘scud and veer’, flags ‘flare and gutter’ and tumblers ‘flip and flex’. He regards Nature as a repository of lost personalities – the wind is a lost voice, the sea is a ...”

“... and, nearby, in the middle of an estate of executive period homes with three-SUV garages, a vast green pantiled Chinese fantasy which houses the Hongxin Oriental Buffet – all you can eat for £12. It’s a more raucous performance than I.M. Pei’s arty pavilion for the Keswick family at Oare, south of Marlborough. There are commendable extensions to the ...”

“... and folk tales are clumsy and blundering and foolish, and their strength doesn’t always prevail: David fells Goliath with a slingshot (like a child in a bombsite playground), and poor boy Jack can outwit the ogre at the top of the beanstalk, however big and strong and vicious and rich he is, and make off with the golden goose. Such stories are popular ...”

“... its grip on the population: real people, slipping off the face of that lovely ground, leaving the green – pleasant lands of Northumberland to be nearer the belly – catch scraps with the shit we set out so grudgingly on plates for the blind to eat in gratitude. What makes poetry like this so inhospitable is, ironically, its radical ...”

“... as a monochrome bird is myopic; as Wires points out, its black feathers have hints of blue, green and copper. It’s possible that the birds, which can probably detect the ultraviolet spectrum, see something very different when they look at one another. Wires may be right to invoke the biblical notion of uncleanness, though not for the reason she ...”

“... into which the Medusa was sailing were ominously warm. The captain did not take note. The sea went green, and crew members worried. The captain did not. Sand scrolled in the waves. Floating cities of kelp appeared: trouble, crew members knew. The sea went clear: they were screwed. The Medusa ran aground on the treacherous Arguin Bank. Chaos ensued. The captain ...”

“... progress of her husband’s major paintings. Nivison’s impact on Hopper was discussed in Vivien Green Fryd’s book Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper (2003), which shows just how significant dysfunctional marriage was for Hopper’s art. The new Hopper exhibition at Tate Modern until 5 September seems determined to write ...”

“... and powerful friends. She had been a celebrity on What’s My Line? and lives on as the subject of David Bowie’s song ‘God Knows I’m Good’. God knows what the authorities would do to a hardened, inarticulate sneak thief from the lower classes. And even if the magistrates were in a forgiving mood, what about the shame? My grandmother had neither a lucid ...”

“... not an academic, thinks otherwise. His life of Dickens opens with the great man dead, lying on the green sofa in the dining-room of Gad’s Hill Place. But Ackroyd does not regard his subject across any fence: he knows Dickens as intimately as the man knew himself; better, perhaps, since Dickens was not great on self-knowledge. There are no lost keys, no ...”

“... Detective Novel, the Companion tells us, was pioneered by women (Metta Victor and Anna Katharine Green) ‘before Conan Doyle’. The entry on the Novel is similarly chauvinistic: ‘Recent scholarship has confirmed that women took the lead among the earliest novelists.’ One could mock this as being like preglasnost history of science, in which Russia ...”

“... and ‘incentives’ were introduced to get spending down. None of these had much effect. A Green Paper in 1986 conceded an at best ‘modest success’. It proposed the Community Charge, which a White Paper in 1983 had declared ‘unworkable’. But by then, many local authorities were having to account creatively and borrow from abroad. To the ...”