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“... sings no more.’ For the rest of his life there was intermittent talk of another oratorio, of a grand opera, of a piano concerto, and of a third symphony: but nothing significant emerged. Honours continued to cascade: the Mastership of the King’s Musick, two more knighthoods and a baronetcy (although not the sought-after peerage). But now they were ...”

“... Most country houses were cold, gloomy, eerie, filthy, smelly and insanitary; they were too grand or too small, too plain or too ornate, too shabby or too vulgar; the food was bad, the company often boring, and there was little to do except hunt; and the servants were frequently dishonest or incompetent, while the nannies were sometimes wicked and ...”

“... and generous. Indefatigable, relentless, remorseless, formidable, indomitable: they sound like the Grand Fleet at anchor at Spithead. It is also revealing that Bridges and Normanbrook were relatively long-lived, as were most of the men in this book. Over one-third were born in the 1880s, and 60 per cent were born before 1890. They survived the First World ...”

“... still that which had evolved during the later part of the reign of Queen Victoria: it was rich, grand, popular, imperial, ceremonially splendid – and also a happy family. The creation of this new-old style of royalty was popularly (and excessively) attributed to Benjamin Disraeli; it was, quite appropriately, a great-power monarchy for the great-power ...”

“... successful social revolution, the great precursor to 1917. Postmodern critics deconstructed the grand historical ‘metanarratives’ in which the French Revolution could have a central place. More recently, the dispiriting outcomes of the Arab Spring and the ‘colour revolutions’ have cast doubt on the ability of revolutions really to change things. And ...”

“... accounts of great crimes plus a mass of ‘occasional’ writings which include his vast Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine. Even as a novelist the scale of his achievement seems scarcely human. The Three Musketeers (1844), the first episode of a saga totalling a million and a quarter words, is as long as five Simenons, yet fills just two of the 310 ...”

“... it’s hard to sustain the idea of Napoleon following any sort of masterplan. The emperor loved grand epigrammatic statements, but these often contradicted each other, furnishing endless ammunition to his endlessly warring biographers: the same man who proclaimed ‘I am the French Revolution’ could also declare that he had found the French crown in the ...”

“... nowhere in particular. If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives of this kind have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. They are no longer mass products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased ...”

“... a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott ...”

“... Diebenkorn remembered helping him hang a show of his work in 1947. But like Elmer Bischoff and David Park, with whom he made the turn to figurative painting a few years later, Diebenkorn was asking questions that abstract expressionism couldn’t always answer, even though, as the early works in the show at the Royal Academy (until 7 June) suggest, he was ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about to be made, rather than something that’s been imposed on an amenable ...”

“... one’s looking for evidence of the poetic style in the prose, it’s all here: the bobby-dazzling grand statement; the vague, adult gesture towards philosophy and religion and anthropology; the brow-furrowing reminder of war; the lolloping punctuation; the careful suggestion of wide reading and the faint twinkle of self-conscious word-play. In 1930 Auden was ...”

“... the world from Iceland to India, largely for the worse. Of the rise of industrial tourism as the Grand Canyon became part of the railroad-based restaurant and hotel empire of Fred Harvey. Of the rise of the modern environmental movement; the evolution of ideas about landscape, aesthetics, the public good and the battles between a boom-town, resource-rush ...”

“... of Toorn’s scribal model. To mention two poems out of many, let me recall the exhilarating grand panorama of creation of Psalm 104 (‘Setting beams for His lofts in the waters,/making His chariot the clouds,/He goes on the wings of the wind . . .’) and the exquisite poetic reprise of Genesis 1 in Psalm 8: When I see Your heavens, the work of Your ...”

“... David Womersley’s massive and elegant edition of Gibbon is the better timed because it comes a century after the edition scholars have been obliged to use as the nearest to a critical text. It was in 1896 that J.B. Bury brought out the first volume of his edition, which he reissued in 1909 and which until now has been considered standard ...”