“... of plants. Grasses can be found from Alaska to Antarctica, from coastal salt marshes and desert sand-dunes to tropical forests and the Tibetan mountains. Exceptionally speciose (more than ten thousand species have been formally described), they range from tiny herbaceous plants to the giant, woody, perennial bamboos of China’s western forests. They ...”

“... this reprint. That’s the kind of silly stuff only you can like.’ It was a review of a book by George Kingsley Zipf, an eccentric Harvard scholar, whose eponymous law concerns word frequencies in any language. For written English, the most frequent word (rank 1), ‘the’, will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word (rank ...”

“... special. Its binding emits a supernatural glow, and – rather like Borges’s ominous ‘Book of Sand’ – its contents don’t seem to end: ‘each time I opened the Book of Fish what amounted to a new chapter miraculously appeared.’ Purportedly written by one William Buelow Gould, a 19th-century ‘recidivist convict artist’, the book contains a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William Morris, George Gissing, Ebenezer Howard and a sprawl of anti-urbanists didn’t foresee was a time when that choice would, inconceivably, be in favour of the centripetal. Of course, in a faute de mieux-ish way, the city was always an unwanted lure, a resented necessity ...”

“... Royal/… Beyond her yet too narrow lease shall stand/With its unshaken head, till time’s last sand.’ This last phrase was borrowed by David Kynaston for the title of his captivating history of the bank.* The exit of the deputy governor remained unequalled for drama until the resignation of another deputy governor during the Barings crash three centuries ...”

“... from their sleep As I gain the cove with pushing prow And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand. Proust’s predecessor Baudelaire would have been enchanted too, but also incredulous – did the poet really not know what he was talking about? Baudelaire has his own kind of innocence, as has even Proust, but the latter merges into a whole perspective ...”

“... this in his beautiful drawing of some dead fish – mostly flat fish – scattered upon the sand in Turner’s Sun rising through vapour. Litter, by definition, is not arranged, and Freud is afraid of arranging his subjects. For this reason he got his model to place the flowers in the still-life, Buttercups of 1968. And he never poses a model. Freud ...”

“... formaldehyde. But the career started in shoes. Warhol caused a bit of bother at college with some George Grosz-like drawings of little boys with their fingers stuck up their noses. Grosz’s notion of Dada – ‘the organised use of insanity to express contempt for a bankrupt world’ – was evidently Warhol’s for a minute or two, but the American boy was ...”

“... legacy as the suffragettes’ first martyr in a talk given at the inaugural Wilding Festival at St George’s Bloomsbury, where Davison’s memorial service was held.1 Emily Wilding Davison was born in 1872 in a substantial house in Greenwich, the middle daughter of her speculator father’s second marriage. She was red-haired and liked sweets; her pet name ...”

“... medievalist who saw the ‘life of forms’ as an almost autonomous force in art, and the American George Kubler, an expert in pre-Columbian artefacts for whom the Panofskyan emphasis on individual style, strict chronology and iconographic analysis (the hunting for sources of images in documents) was not helpful in a field where known artists, exact dates and ...”

“... and browns that shade smoothly into each other and perhaps give the impression of cream, or pale sand. Its beak is black, its claws are brown; it has black wingtips and a dark streak leading from the back of each eye. Its legs are often described by observers as ‘milky-white’. In the early 19th century there was some experimenting with different ...”

“... in Iraq has been high: Elizabeth Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move freely. Astill’s longest conversation with an Iraqi in Fallujah was with a man ...”

“... upon an unsure foundation, like the Man in the Gospel who laid the foundation of his House in the Sand.’ In Valencia he and Wolton had encountered the famous horrors of the Inquisition tribunal in the shape of a ‘charitable and freindly’ old priest, who had ‘pressed us to propose all our objections against the roman Catholick Religion’ so that he ...”