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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But the rest he can take or leave. In May 1902, he visits the Louvre and is unimpressed by David and Velázquez. He mistakes Chardin’s eggs for onions. ‘Nothing here means anything to me.’ As he leaves the museum he sees a blackbird, poised against a wall of green, which eclipses all the paintings he has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In the morning, David Cameron was holding an emergency press conference on the television stuck in the top left-hand corner of the breakfast room: ‘Work is at the heart of a responsible society,’ he politely hectored the assembled hacks, while we sloped off on our walking ...”

“... the new towns – Ortolano calls it ‘welfare state modernism’ (clean modernist lines, but in green, airy and usually low-rise estates) – ran into trouble: first, because the need to build fast and cheaply, at a time of serious shortages of materials, led to substitutions and the cutting of corners; second, because the style itself, as the privatisation ...”

“... was characteristically scathing about the morals of the British officers, ‘whose ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’. If the soldiers seemed lacking in imagination, the journalists who accompanied the ...”

“... effectively to create a special sense of kingship’. There was to be a grand firework display in Green Park, accompanied by Handel’s specially commissioned Music for the Royal Fireworks. Lacking the expertise to stage the spectacle, courtiers turned to Tyers, who lent his advice and staff on one condition: that he be allowed to hold a ‘rehearsal’ of ...”

“... but because Eden’s actions were sensed to be duplicitous and therefore a blot on England’s sea-green incorruptibility. If militarism and realpolitik have disguised themselves in a blanket of duty, the alternative liberal-pacifist tradition has been equally riddled with ambiguities. In theory, Cobden’s Englishman was economic man, attending solely to his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anyone, doesn’t appear to have fought in any jihad and doesn’t have an Oxford degree. He has a green belt in jujitsu and a blue belt in Taekwondo, acquired in classes in his native Birmingham, and speaks English, Urdu and Arabic, along with some Pashto and a little Bosnian. What the Americans got when they captured him was a small ...”

“... 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to realise one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity.’ Bishop’s ‘timidity’ is part of the reason why, at the time of her ...”

“... conveniently assuming that the Americans would endorse what it was doing, even when there was no green light from Washington. In other words, Israel used the same policy of ‘eliciting authorisation’ when it came to dealings with its superpower patron. In my view this is a crucial aspect of Israeli military history and the close connection between the two ...”