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“... his one Oxford friend, or Lucinda, and suddenly, with his heart-shaped face and red hair and green eyes he’s a Dante Gabriel Rossetti angel. Usually inarticulate, he has moments of blazing eloquence. At his first meeting with Lucinda, on a ship to Australia, he is swept away by a Pascalian vision: We bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We ...”

“... go back with some money. But it didn’t often work out that way. Most of them stayed. Jonathon Green’s book is not easy reading, nor can it have been intended to be. He has interviewed 103 first-generation immigrants to Britain about their experiences. His subjects speak for themselves; there is an introduction, but no comment thereafter. In the letters ...”

“... beauty. We found as we explored that the insides of the four great smoke stacks are lined with green-grey iridescent ceramic tiles. I’ve seen few things as beautiful; you could build a wall in them and outdo a king. Scott must have known that almost nobody would ever see them, but their presence is a bold and lovely fact. There are, too, flourishes built ...”

“... His aim here is to describe some of his most memorable explorations by way of ‘pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets’, to say nothing of ‘holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways’. There is a long tradition here: walkers might be wayfarers for whom travel is work ...”

“... were sharply cut; the spies laid their schemes not in smoke-filled rooms but by the flickering green light of computer screens. Still, it was comfort TV. It depicted a world that looked just like the real one except that nothing in it would actually come to pass. The voters weren’t about to embrace socialism, forcing the establishment to do its ...”

“... smell that some people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped green acres used, so recently, to be. Mulch of market gardens. Animal droppings in hot mounds. The distant rumble of construction convoys. The heron dance of elegant cloud-scraping cranes. Flocks of cyclists clustering together for safety, dipping and swerving ...”

“... with a bit of a breeze but a clear sky, when I boarded a small shabby Boston Whaler belonging to David Wingate. We were going to Nonsuch Island, the home of the cahow, an oceanic bird that was believed extinct for more than 300 years. Invisible most of the time and, like most Bermudians, off at sea as often as possible, it is unique to Bermuda and now one of ...”

“... admired architects working in a contemporary vernacular, such as the Norfolk practice, Tayler and Green, whose council estates and old people’s bungalows were built of brick and tile, had pitched roofs and were described by him (in the early 1950s) as ‘almost Post-Modern’. Inevitably, Pevsner’s terms of reference were far from insular. He compared ...”

“... no such thing, and it is still hard to work out the rationale, even when you look for it in David Fraser Jenkins and Hugh Fowler-Wright’s The Art of John Piper, a nearly exhaustive survey of his career in all its phases. Fraser Jenkins, who curated the Tate’s 1983 retrospective on the occasion of Piper’s 80th birthday, knows the career well, and ...”

“... at the Royal Academy’s Sackler Galleries, I looked down Piccadilly towards the Ritz and Green Park and tried to see the view as Turner might have done. The day was a little misty (he would have liked that) and the sun a brightness hidden in cloud. I could make a guess at how he would have handled the distant trees in the park and the disappearing ...”

“... to me was worried that he wouldn’t be able to get an interview with any of the guys from GQ. David Gandy, the male supermodel, wearing a shark-tooth suit and a Burberry tie, was being interviewed for Fashion TV. Within seconds of him standing up people were photographing him being filmed. You see this all the time at fashion events. Legend says there was ...”

“... is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the discontent that a significant percentage of British people now feels about the monarchy. That sense of friendship, of a shared and living republican culture, is present in Melville’s many ...”

“... Elizabethan comedy – it is easy for the politically-sound critic to suppose that he can become a Green Man and still be a Red. So too in the section on John Clare, described by Harrison as ‘the most authentic and inalienable voice of modern literature’ (‘inalienable’ because alienated, I take him to mean): poems such as ‘The Fallen Elm’ and ...”

“... Somalis. I don’t hear my first bullet in Mogadishu until late afternoon. I’m standing with David Shearer, field director of the Save the Children Fund, on the flat roof of the SCF staff house, hardly troubled by the thought that we’re both crisply silhouetted against the skyline. At the report, I flinch – no, I jump. I look at Shearer and see that ...”

“... The militias have left the streets, but they haven’t gone very far. Visiting dignitaries to the Green Zone, whether George Bush, Gordon Brown or Barack Obama, seldom realise the extent of the military operations required to protect them or the impact of these operations on Iraqis, and so get an exaggerated impression of the progress towards normality in ...”