“... heart and work, anonymously, on a rig for six months – participatory journalism in the style of George Plimpton? Or will he set off by small boat and sail from rig to rig (‘Ahoy there, your muse wishes to come on board’) as the word ‘journey’ in the title might imply? Will there be storms? Will Alvarez come close to the edge of life? Will the ...”

“... considered view of a serious scholar on the sense of a difficult text. This is certainly true of George Goold’s Aeneid, which I am careful to consult often and thoughtfully. Loebs are sometimes useful, too, as providing a text (of sorts) for authors not otherwise easily available, and as giving rapidly the context in, say, some long, sticky passage of ...”

“... of things can be fully comprehended or confined by any set of conceptual categories: the sand of experience and evidence is always slipping between the fingers. Yet there is a confidence about his analysis, a sense of that mastery of an intensely difficult pursuit which he recognises as one of the most highly civilised expressions of the aggressive ...”

“... Rosselli’s wife), and signed by many prominent figures on the left, including Bertrand Russell, George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson and Jennie Lee: We, the undersigned, appeal to the conscience of humanity against the cruel persecution of the widowed Velia Matteotti during the eight years since her husband’s murder, a persecution which keeps her and her ...”

“... also speculates in a similar vein about the later and sunnier correspondence with the publisher, George Smith, whose evident pleasure in Brontë’s letters may partly have arisen, she thinks, from the artist’s capacity imaginatively to transform him with her pen, recreating him in a form cleverly designed to soothe his insecurities. Though Brontë’s ...”

“... every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see.’ She goes on to invoke George Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’, translating his figure of the life touched by God into secular terms: ‘But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy – to make life endurable and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick”.’ Some of ...”

“... specimen. Nonetheless, it is clearly a landscape: there is grass, or scrub, and a tree, and yellow sand. Above the horizon there is a black sky, though sharp light illuminates the landscape itself. At the very centre of the painting black paint rises like a flapping, swirling creature with another amorphous daub below it. ‘What they surely represent,’ the ...”

“... off with a selection from Glamorous Night. Then, having played themselves in, they accompany Uncle George, my father’s brother, in some songs. Uncle George is a bricklayer and has a fine voice and a face as red as his bricks. He sings ‘Bless This House’ and ‘Where’er You Walk’, and sometimes Grandma has a little ...”

“... also contributed a paper to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on the use of sea sand containing organic compounds for fertiliser. The essay includes a ‘project’ for the increased use of such sand and, as Novak points out, is very much in Defoe’s projecting mode. There was an anti-monarchical bias in ...”

“... sky thick with ethereal birds of prey and a terrible smell that hit them harder than a fistful of sand in the face, a stench that made them want to hawk it up before it reached their guts, that made them want to stop and turn round.The whole latter part of the sentence is grammatically unsupported, cantilevered over empty space.This is not the long sentence ...”

“... but a makeshift coathanger he has rigged up over the bath in order to dry his anorak.14 January. George Fenton tells me of a memorial service he’s been to at St Marylebone Parish Church for Maurice Murphy, the principal trumpet of the LSO, who did the opening trumpet solo in the music for Star Wars. The service due to kick off at 11.30, ...”

“... style and under the same rubrics. The setting out of the textual notes, no bigger than grains of sand silting across page after page, discourages even the specialist trying to get her bearings. Selection of texts to collate is capricious; no attempt is made for example to collate the 1691 printing of Valentinian with the manuscript sources and the version ...”

“... He was trying, sometimes precisely and sometimes with unbelievable slackness, to tell us, like George Meredith in his day, what he knew about ‘modern love’, and to find narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the slackness may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches of the novels that are neither ...”

“... picture, Two Girls against Red (1960), is done with pastel on sandpaper. (The binder clings to the sand, giving a tiny depth of field.) The girls, their heads together, each with an arm slung around the other’s neck, have eyes fixed on the present. In all Joan Eardley’s paintings of the Samson children, they seem to have some common knowledge only the ...”

“... and radical LA seemed either to have succumbed to decadence, or to have run into the sand. Yet like many veteran leftists, Davis and Wiener are good at pointing out forgotten victories as well as dissecting defeats. They cite a successful local campaign in 1969 against the proposed redevelopment of Venice, the city’s ‘last poor beach’, from ...”