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“... et misères at the Musée d’Orsay, given a red-plush overall design by the opera director Robert Carsen, is a vast and sprawling show: aesthetic, sociological and historical, from high-end paintings to low-end memorabilia (police reports, brothel calling cards, and a ferocious gimletty prodder which, as far as I could work out, was for puncturing a ...”

“... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on ...”

“... strategy (as opposed to short-term tactics, at which he was as adroit as he was on the putting green). As a young man, he liked to claim that he was prey to hopeless indecision and could never decide whether to descend from the first floor by the left or by the right of the two great staircases of his London house. What was so damaging was his affectation ...”

“... feeling a bit seasick and discovered that all the postboxes and telephone booths had been painted green. But in those pre-euro days the shops still accepted ordinary money, and my mother used to say that what she liked best about the place, apart from the Mary O’Hara records, was that with its bumpy single-track roads and straying donkeys it reminded her of ...”

“... drove so many prominent men to acts of such lustful folly. Her conquests included Franz Liszt, Robert Peel (son of the prime minister), the French newspaper editor Alexandre Dujarier, Marius Petipa (the creator of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker), the Earl of Malmesbury, the Count of Schleissen, Lord Brougham (once described as ‘the ugliest man of the ...”

“... crisis had never gone away; memories of the disorder of the Civil War and Interregnum were still green. Peers and Commons were united in their struggle to exclude a Catholic heir to the throne, while the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous ...”

“... carried me home on her shoulders. I gripped the dinosaur in one hand. It was still wet with green and purple poster paint. After that things turned delirious. I had mumps . . . When I caught the mumps I couldn’t read; when I went back to school again, I could. The first page of The Hobbit was a thicket of symbols, to be decoded one at a time and ...”

“... letters have had a following since a small selection was included in the prose collection In the Green Tree (1948): ‘It may be,’ Walter Allen wrote in the New Statesman, ‘that these letters will ultimately take a higher place than either the poetry or the stories for, like Keats’s, they point to a maturity beyond anything their author had been able ...”

“... May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his prose writings, but his first poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, composed on 3 December 1914, opens with a version of the ...”

“... and the other artists who could be considered Yiddish modernists – the painters Nathan Altman, Robert Falk and, for a time, El Lissitzky, the composers Lev Pulver and Moshe Milner, the writer who called himself Der Nister – were defined by the struggle to integrate these two tendencies. ‘Our first imprimatur is our modernism, our leftism and our ...”

“... painted books, ancient chants, plaster statues’, with too much downtime for hunting, cards and green chartreuse. They live in denial until the rising body count forces the abbot to concede: ‘It’s all over … Our life here. The monastic life in England.’ Puzzles and deaths drift up like the snow that eventually transforms Scarnsea into a locked-room ...”

“... by a big bay window; the second, in unpainted plywood, by a huge chimney; and the third, in green asphalt, by giant steps cut into the roof. Typological signalling can be effective as an architectural language, and Gehry often makes it witty. But it can also be manipulative in its Pop imagery and inflated scale.Gehry’s work of the mid to late 1980s ...”

“... expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside the ...”

“... On its inside wall was a hand-painted scroll featuring the famous couplet from ‘To a Louse’ by Robert Burns: ‘O wad some power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us.’The documents Barr and Painter rescued from the Broadway are now in the Moving Image Archive in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall, once the home of the city’s annual carnival and ...”

“... bold Fenian men’ or complaining (after 1921) of the bondage which shackles one of her ‘four green fields’, this plangent yet bloodthirsty crone is as worn a cultural token as those related feminine stereotypes, Dark Rosaleen and Cathleen Ní Houlihan. In the rapidly modernising Ireland of satellite TV and legalised divorce, she might seem an exhausted ...”