“... His intellect.’The V of the diaries is ‘severe’. He does not take his clothes off on the beach. He does not dance. His father was ‘a tyrant and a disciplinarian’ who died when V was 24, and he ‘hated’ his mother for no reason apparent here. (‘Well, I don’t want to lose touch with you. Because I love you,’ his mother says to H after the ...”

“... I saw no good reason why I couldn’t walk the shore from the village of Grain, along Cockleshell Beach to the London Stone; or, failing that, down a track past Rose Court Farm to Grain Marsh. But maps are deceptive: they entice you with pure white space, little blue rivulets, a church with a tower, the promise of a shell-hunting foreshore; and then they hit ...”

“... as a ‘Nature Gem’ really all that different from an ‘Atlantis’ reconstructed on a Bahamian beach or the fake ruins of Hubert Robert, both of which she gives as examples of kitsch, just because one is real, the others fake, one melancholic, the others nostalgic? Both categories of object seem to me to trade on the viewer’s engrained sentiments and ...”

“... grey’. In each example, Kipling’s language is patently not inert, but, like the harp of True Thomas, birls and brattles in Kipling’s hands. We think of Kipling as a special, borderline case, but he is not. Arnold memorably damn ed Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’ in his essay ‘The Study of Poetry’, a critical manoeuvre Eliot then used ...”

“... of himself’ and having ‘regained his innocence ... can go calmly to his death’. Neither Thomas Mann’s novella nor Britten’s treatment of it give an ounce of support for these readings. The imprisonment of Aschenbach’s mind in the maze of desire is imaged in the maze of Venice, a closed-in world, fetid with the stench of plague. Britten’s ...”

“... rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s daughter Una later wrote Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside ...”

“... site in the lesbian imagination. Stein and Toklas, Barney, Romaine Brooks, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Dolly Wilde, Janet Flanner, H.D. – we’ve been hearing about them for ages and the line-up never changes. If anything, thanks to influential (and romanticising) books like Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986) and Andrea Weiss’s Paris Was a ...”

“... are known for having made great work by such inartistic means. One is the naive artist: the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson reputedly arranged his masterpiece, Pet Sounds, by sitting all day with a small orchestra and singing each instrumentalist his part. He’d have the ensemble perform, then he’d make alterations, listen again, and so forth, until the ...”

“... the Tories. ‘In seaside areas, traditionally, politics have been quite fluid,’ said Norman Thomas, who produces Thanet Watch, a local investigative magazine. ‘There’s a feeling that lots of Tories are waiting to see which way the wind blows before jumping ship to Ukip.’ Thomas believes those most likely to vote ...”

“... the seeker for black pearls, the man who prefers the monsters of the deep to the sunshades on the beach, will find in The Overcoat shadows linking our state of existence to those other states and modes we dimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception ... At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the ...”

“... tones of the doorframe and the road in the foreground; and a panel showing tourists on the beach, the tents and the sea related by a tinny blue, and the clouds created out of the colours of the sand and the women’s dresses. In these works, Sickert was deploying Whistler’s preferred alla prima, or ‘wet on wet’, technique, which Whistler also ...”

“... in the pyramid gave entry to a network of underground tunnels. The fabled Chinese Limehouse of Thomas Burke and Sax Rohmer, of Oscar Wilde’s opium dens, has long gone. And now the Good Friends restaurant in Salmon Lane, to which hungry diners travelled from all over the city, has followed them: converted into a store for building supplies. The spirit of ...”

“... By the time I got to Belfast and phoned him again the line was dead. 13. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtain, a known figure in the IRA, was gunned down at his home on 19 March 1920. The late-night callers were three members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. One of them was later identified as District-Inspector Oswald Swanzy. The Chief Secretary for ...”

“... Water restaurant in Cobham, on top of Snowdon, for the Romney’s House extension, on Criccieth beach; Swedish Classical at Bishop’s Stortford, Oxford, Belfast; Baroque at Bushmills or, over-hurriedly, less successfully, at Stowe. While it is true that he could gag up – the phrase we all preferred was ‘clough up’ – that pair of ...”

“... A jolt of paranoia. They have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds ...”