“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the wrong.’ ‘She never once asked me what I did,’ Plath’s downstairs neighbour, Trevor Thomas, said. ‘She never asked me if I painted, or if I drew, or was I an artist. I could have done a portrait of her if she had been co-operative.’ This is a startling complaint, from someone who was nearly killed when the gas from Plath’s apartment sank ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... making him seem like an American saviour who took a bullet for his own people.The shooter, Thomas Crooks, was wearing a T-shirt for a YouTube channel called DemolitionRanch, which has 11.7 million subscribers. He was a registered Republican who donated $15 to ActBlue, a register-to-vote pressure group. He was killed instantly by Secret Service snipers ...”

“... moved in after coal went was drugs. Day trippers and dog walkers come to the bright expanse of beach just down from the harbour mouth. It’s only half an hour by car or train from the southern edge of Blyth to the centre of Newcastle, and the town is becoming a satellite of the big city. ‘Most of Blyth, in all honesty, has kind of recovered from the ...”

“... designer gas Freon, properly chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), developed in 1930 by the American chemist Thomas Midgley for General Motors Frigidaire as a substitute for the poisonous liquid ammonia previously used in refrigerators. Freon is almost chemically inert, non-poisonous; it boils at room temperature. It did a great job in the air conditioners that were ...”

“... Vivien), a large supine sow who is also perhaps a naked woman (an exercise in Belgian Gothic by Thomas Owen), an acrobatic goldfish (Garcin) whose underwater antics intercede between a father and son; there are the placid apes who come at sunset to assist in the sinister recreational proceedings of Monique Wittig’s dystopian ‘The Garden’; and there is ...”

“... Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of anxiety’ after he sees the footprint on the beach, and although Novak doesn’t draw this parallel, the atmosphere of anxiety which suffuses the novel can be traced to the ‘feeling of conspiracy’ which dominated Dissenters’ thinking during the Restoration – G.M. Trevelyan calls the years 1678-85 ...”

“... in Creativity’, sounds stern, but the case histories it describes are those of Kandinsky, Thomas Mann and Giacometti. If those are the angry actors, where’s the harm in joining their gang? As the article explains, ‘whether attempts at channelling aggression are successful or not depends largely on the ability of the ego to tolerate ...”

“... and violence, as dignitaries dived into the bunkers on the golf course or made a dash for the beach. The cadets had been terrified at first, but the extravagance of the buffet was a call to arms: they blasted away at the pyramids of food and any guests who were still on the terrace. BineBine crept away, stole one of the guests’ cars, drove to the house ...”

“... if it is quickened, he commits homicide.’ Bracton also says if you find a whale washed up on the beach, you should send the head to the king and the tail to the queen.The court argues that, at the time of its drafting, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment would not have viewed abortion as a right but as a crime. Their appeal to history is ...”