“... 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 their elegant seven-room Schöneberg flat was fading, Herr Doktor Fiegel dug a garden in the sand at the front of his house and the family continued to eat black bread with quark and cumin in the evenings – a Berlin habit to which Miriam still holds. Miriam asked Hugues to bring cheesecake mix and cream stiffener from Berlin, for the Kuchen she will ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pull off the desired result in six months, an assurance which Eden, especially in the light of George Bush’s subsequent experiences with Saddam Hussein, can perhaps be for given for not believing. Enraged by Eden’s disingenuousness and frustrated at being sidelined on the eve of an election in which he was to be ‘the candidate for ...”

“... captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –    ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ The sand of the desert is sodden red –    Red with the wreck of a square that broke – The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,    And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks,    And England’s far, and honour ...”

“... 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 ...”