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“... move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi ...”

“... attended to. In the Paris panoramas on show, as in paintings like The Rehearsal, Dancers in the Green Room and The Dance Lesson, what you would see top and bottom in a standard landscape format is cropped. These panoramas (some taken with special cameras) also took in the area you would have to scan, turning your head, when standing to admire the view. In ...”

“... Revue Française’s Proust, a winter treat for when the ice on the Danube had turned dark grey-green, and the postman wore foot-cloths and felt boots. Why the burst of sensibility? Because during the winters, when the family were trapped in the house, it seems that for Melchior’s father the postman’s packages made landmarks. In 1919, the year Melchior ...”

“... with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big ...”

“... Only a couple, such as ‘A Dead Boche’ (‘he scowled and stank/With clothes and face a sodden green’), include specific details of the front lines. Just before his 21st birthday Graves was wounded so badly by an exploding shell that for 24 hours he was given up for dead. The colonel of his battalion wrote to his parents to inform them of their loss, and ...”

“... Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision and the most delicate subtlety the implications of Frost’s rival definitions of the idea of home ...”

“... the destruction of habitats?The prophets of decoupling belong to a motley but expanding crew of green-growthers, including financiers such as the former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, economists including Per Espen Stoknes of the Norwegian Business School and Mariana Mazzucato of University College London, and business gurus like Paul Hawken ...”

“... Pepys went ‘at noon to dinner, where the remains of yesterday’s venison and a couple of brave green [i.e. young] geese’. Wall wants to see recipes not only as the beguiling curiosities they evidently are, but also as sites for something like a domestic version of experimental science. One of the defining narratives of the 17th century is the rise of a ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another ...”

“... politically divided into two colour-coded blocs, along Byzantine lines. On one side is the ‘pan-Green camp’, comprising two pro-independence forces: the Democratic People’s Party (DPP), in control of the executive since 2000, and its recently created ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). On the other is the ‘pan-Blue camp’, composed of the ...”

“... made such an impact on me was that it wasn’t among the ten Montale poems that appeared in Robert Lowell’s 1961 book of translations, Imitations. I am saying, I suppose, that Lowell spoiled the ground in making it accessible. At this moment I would guess that Imitations is more influential than any other aspect of Lowell’s poetic practice: the idea ...”

“... There​ was a primed plastic water pistol, yellow or green, on every table at Derek Walcott’s 84th birthday lunch at the Ladera hotel on the west coast of St Lucia. The Walcott entourage had taken over the restaurant and after we’d dined on saltfish with green bananas, the staff gathered and the guests stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday ...”

“... just been a nuisance to him. However, in 1932, he got to know the young, beautiful and dotty Robert Heber Percy, otherwise known as ‘the Mad Boy’, for whom he fell and who became a fixture in his household, eventually inheriting Berners’s estate. ‘No one,’ Mark Amory writes, ‘could liberate Berners himself at this stage, but Heber Percy ...”

“... Two years later, aged 23, Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea (1952), its watery veils of green, blue, pink, ochre and grey spread irregularly across the surface in unusual shapes. This was the first work in her new style and it was produced by a new technique. She poured oil paint diluted with turpentine directly onto unprimed canvas laid on the ...”

“... the pass:And today a girl walks in home to usCarrying a basket full of new potatoes,Three tight green cabbages, and carrotsWith the tops and mould still fresh on them.Such an ending, in its tender hope, looks cynicism’s desperation levelly in the eye. The gait with which the line itself ‘walks in home to us’ is simply sturdy. There are no ...”