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“... sex of the Marquise, in those permissive times. Then came a Cinderella-esque marriage to (Baron) Henry de Jouvenal, editor of Le Matin, later a politician of considerable distinction. One thing about Colette interests me: when did she stop lying about her age? The voluptuous dancer was pushing 40 when she married De Jouvenal: ‘But the registry office has ...”

“... I think.’ Tite Street was the family home; he did not return there. The spectre of Wilde haunted Henry James in the first two months of 1895, and James’s correspondence gives us a much richer sense than Wilde’s does of what the opening of a new play could mean at the turn of the 19th century. ‘Who shall deny the immense authority of the theatre,’ he ...”

“... used a bottle of prescription olive oil to clean the salad bowl. Now look!’ A line of tank-green bottles stretched into the distance. ‘Choice!’ she said.Supermarket people like to use certain words. When you are with them in the fruit department they all say ‘fresh’ and ‘juicy’ and ‘variety’ and ‘good farming practices’. (Or as head ...”

“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s most ...”

“... his subjects – close enough to capture the warmth radiating from their skin. Novelists such as Henry James and Proust seem to want to reduce the distance between themselves and their characters virtually to nothing – to bore into their characters’ skulls and take us with them. Cather, rather more conservatively, locates herself about four or five feet ...”

“... is changed to various colours. They imitate thus, among other things, bunches of grapes with green tendrils.’ Tennyson’s passion for accuracy of detail is alive even in his excesses and absurdities: the description of a steamboat which he dropped from both ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ and ‘Audley Court’, ‘The snoring funnel whizzed with ...”

“... throne. The geisha have been booked by telephone, The whisky brought, the raw fish on the ice, The green tea boiled, the saké in its stone Warmed to a turn, and seaweed, root and spice Await their last repose, the tub of nutcrisp rice. The scene is set, and soon a wall will slide, And in will run, professional as hell, Our geisha team, brisk as a soccer ...”

“... and Costa Rica rather than, say, Ethiopia, where the marginal pound would go much further. The green value of buying locally grown food is overblown, too, since transport accounts for only 10 per cent of the carbon footprint of food, while 80 per cent of it is generated in production; tomatoes grown in the UK can have five times the carbon footprint of ...”

“... essay. Lorck is one of these oddities, with elective affinities to a Gothic sensibility like Henry Fuseli’s and to the shadowed empty spaces of de Chirico, and even the eerie objectivity of photographers like Atget and Sander. In a rare essay on Lorck’s drawings from 1955, Peter Ward-Jackson noticed ‘the hallucinatory quality’ of his work, ‘the ...”

“... as Gide liked to say, and we may have to raise some questions when someone like Henry James comes along and offers to codify its new ‘laws’ in doctrines like ‘point of view’. Even though he is virtually absent from this book, for reasons I will come to, Faulkner offered his own useful tripartite formula for what the novelist’s ...”

“... Brunetto a last homage with the words: After he turned back he seemed like one who races for the green cloth on the plain beyond Verona. And he looked more the winner than the one who trails the field.The tension between divine justice and mutual regard could hardly be greater. Damned, Brunetto still seems a winner. It’s as if God’s punishment were an ...”

“... sovereignty was respected by the victorious powers, particularly Japan, which, in a campaign green-lighted by Britain during the war, had seized German-held territory in the Shandong peninsula. Asians and Africans accustomed to stonewalling colonial officials were naturally attracted to the generous promises of the American president. But Wilson, a ...”

“... a Dostoevsky novel,’ a place full of ‘the imagination of disaster’ – the phrase comes from Henry James – and not just the imagination, we might add. In this light, Trilling then says, we may feel that Tolstoy ‘gives us, after all, not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality’. This is very intriguing, and a long way – too far, probably ...”

“... Yvonne Hegoburu tends the six-and-a-half hectares of her Domaine de Souch according to the Green principles of ‘biodynamie’ and as a homage to her dead husband; in Sardinia, Battista Columbu reckons that he has an ‘ethical commitment’ to continue producing his tiny quantities of unique Malvasia; and in Argentina, an indigenous farmer’s single ...”

“... the original of a Peter Brookes cartoon which appeared in the Times. It shows a House of Commons green bench, deserted apart from two figures. Fox, eyes staring and face aghast, is reading out his resignation speech, while next to him a colleague hides his face behind a book: it is, appropriately and gratifyingly, The Sense of an Ending. The cause of Fox’s ...”