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“... not least Freud’s, Kitty is remarkably covered up; she wears a jumper with ribbed neck and green contoured stripes, and a voluptuous velvet skirt. But Freud’s meticulous naturalism and the translucence of his flesh tones lend an almost indecent air of exposure to the portrait. It’s easy to see why critics have interpreted Girl with Roses as a ...”

“... all conceivably be a figment of Seth’s increasingly deranged imagination. There is a series of David Lynch-style time-slip and personality-slip effects. One moment he is in jail in present-day Mississippi; the next he’s a black man in the 1920s, charged with a crime he didn’t commit. The second half of the book is skilfully constructed, page by ...”

“... that survives precious. Some of the best medieval poems – Beowulf, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – have come down to us in a single manuscript. Four books contain about two-thirds of all surviving Old English poetry, and for a few months in 2018 those four lay side by side in a single (doubtless heavily insured) glass case for an exhibition at ...”

“... of risky professional choices: 35 West 9th Street was a handsome Italianate prewar co-op with a green awning anchored to polished brass poles and late-blooming geraniums spilling from terraced window boxes high above; 72 Perry Street, sandwiched between stately townhouses, was a mute, shabby rowhouse painted over in a hideous maroon, with shaded windows ...”

“... Queen Incog’ in this rough and tumble burlesque, and according to her first biographer David Baker, who wrote eight years after her death in 1756, she ‘appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’ with the feckless Hatchett. But that’s as warm as the paternity trail ever gets. It doesn’t help, as Baker also recorded, that ...”

“... every anonymous work sends us off in search of an author. Finding out who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight might deepen our understanding of the poem, but it might prove no more enlightening than finding out who bolted down the final rivet on the Forth Bridge. There are literary works in which what speaks is less a personal voice than a set of ...”

“... later to a belief that it would save trouble if she gave them to the NSPCC, ‘who bring a green bag round every week to collect the waste paper’. But the inevitable gaps in the material do not excuse the fact that the book is so badly edited. The sparse footnotes are whimsical to a degree, telling us that when Fitzgerald mentioned that her ...”

“... most ardent supporters, fresh air was to be had in abundance from the creation of new parks and green spaces. The latter project was supported by the Church, on the grounds that what was good for the lungs was also good for the soul, ‘improvement’ all the way down. It also spawned the great Second Empire myth of the park as a space for the amicable ...”

“... balls online is ‘the blazing endpoint of civilisation … the seasickness of ancestors turning green’, and yet she isn’t necessarily being facetious. Maybe this is in fact a triumph of human harmony and a symptom of a peaceful and abundant society – better the impulse to post pictures of your balls than the impulse to evangelise or bomb. When Thomas ...”

“... Aga Khan had fallen in love with its wind-eroded granite shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters. He and a few investor friends bought 38 miles of coast and 13,000 hectares of land from the daughters of peasants in the area (the sons inherited the more fertile inland plots), hired five architects and built a resort town, Porto Cervo, more easily ...”

“... universities, where public events on Palestine are all but banned.A single tweet by Volker Beck, a Green Party politician and now a crusader against antisemitism (or, more accurately, anti-Zionism), seemed to be enough to get an event cancelled. When the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, the director of Forensic Architecture, and Francesca Albanese, the UN ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony in the west of the city. Five foot two, green-eyed, a self-described ‘gypsy-spirited tyrannical pirate’ with a face that was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before ...”

“... gardens or satellite dishes. The other houses, still painted in leprous pastel colours, pink, green, yellow or blue, and covered in graffiti, have been stripped bare: the ex-inhabitants have taken everything – the doors, the windows, the sinks, the toilets, the sockets. ‘If they could take the house away they would,’ a PM headline blares. The cement ...”

“... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...”