“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... things wrong, as he sometimes does. But Gifford tells us that Edward VII had tattoos, as did George V, as did Nicholas II of Russia and Alphonso XII of Spain, not to speak of Lady Randolph Churchill. Slote, Mamigonian and Turner add that Edward VII ‘received his first tattoo in 1862’, and then give us a source for this, as they generally do. But they ...”

“... had already been exhausted on their behalf in the French and Indian War. In his 1763 proclamation, George III made major concessions to Indian tribes and declared the Appalachian mountain range to be the outer limit of colonial expansion. For trigger-happy real estate speculators like George Washington, who had ignited the ...”

“... Froude was mortified but unrepentant. He was used to controversy. James Anthony Froude by George Reid, 1881. The Life was a homemade bomb; the History was a meteorite, a bolide from somewhere remote and unknown. It inspired Tennyson to try to reactivate English verse drama with Queen Mary. It’s huge – two and a half million words in six and a ...”

“... Moon (1999).Brand emigrated to Canada in 1970 with ‘five hundred dollars/and a passport full of sand and winking water’. Toronto was a place where ‘the wealth multiplies in the garbage dumps,/and the quiet is the quiet of thieves.’ But Brand’s prose writings also describe the Black community she found there. ‘Driving North, Driving Home’, from ...”

“... from his wetsuit, however, Deakin appears to dispense with worldly goods. He inherited a copy of George Borrow’s Wild Wales from his great-uncle Joe (who took it from the prison library when he left Parkhurst in 1892, ‘where he was doing time at the age of 20 on the trumped-up charge that he was a dangerous anarchist’), and had been impressed since ...”

“... hear that the line ‘Free me, Lord, from evil folk’ (140) is best spoken in the voice of George Bush. Inversion, the possessive, the unpronounceable and an unfortunate word-choice all converge in Psalm 18, where he transforms a dull line in the King James (‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto ...”

“... in the palaeobiologists’ graphs look so sudden and steep, like obelisks rising out of the sand in a desert. But this is an effect of scaling, which marks time in intervals of fifty million years. Extinction is a protracted, uneven process, and hard to square with our mental picture of abrupt catastrophe.Sadiah Qureshi wants to change the way we ...”

“... how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who ...”

“... Gezira Sporting Club to the west. I learned to count to ten by timing the sunset each night, the sand in the air making the sun a scumbled, smouldering ball, dropping fast and heavily, as if overcome by its own heat. My father had gone ahead of us and been to the Mouski to buy Persian and Turkish rugs, mirrors with gilded and curly frames; brass trays ...”

“... all of its fleshly temptations and attendant despairs, is an obvious incitement to grace; thus, George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, and Rock Against Racism, and Live Aid, and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can ...”

“... light itself turning into money. Stephen’s debt re-emerges during his argument with the poet George ‘A.E.’ Russell (one of his many creditors) as he stakes his fraught bid for literary inheritance to his own reserve and storehouse, the five-vowelled alphabet: A.E.I.O.U. In Burke’s pub and Bella Cohen’s brothel, Stephen is as spendthrift as the ...”

“... Christ’s fought him until the establishment of UCCA forced Cambridge to take its head out of the sand. Another reason was Cambridge democracy. It was good that all dons were consulted about university business: not so good that they could vote on every issue. What was bad was the paralysis suffered by those trying to effect even minute changes and the ...”

“... Croll in the opening decades of this century. Although Croll’s arguments have been refined by George Williamson and other literary scholars, their significance has not been grasped by historians, who miss the connection between style and content so well understood by Lipsius’s supporters and opponents alike. The new prose was ...”