“... publication is as yet only partially complete. The first six volumes take us as far as 1804 (it took Grieg two to cover the same span); at the present rate of production – two volumes per half year – the full text should be available by the end of 1981. The editors have decided, partly because of financial considerations, not to append notes or an index ...”

“... with three exceptions, come to a vividly described and very far from delightful end in which he took no pleasure at all.Up until about this time Raban seems to have found little to suit his purpose; but once sea-bathing, seaside holidays, Romanticism and sailing for pleasure, usually in small boats, were firmly established, a great wealth or at least a ...”

“... the imposing sandstone cliffs that mark the entrance to Port Jackson and into a waterway that John White, the First Fleet’s surgeon, proclaimed as ‘the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe’. The hyperbole was perhaps understandable, for the Britons were seeing Sydney Harbour through eyes wearied by months at sea, and this was to be ...”

“... Wilson’. The likes of, eh? Still, this helps introduce a rather interesting section on Tate, John Crowe Ransom and the so-called Southern Agrarians. Tate, who was more or less openly nostalgic for the Old Confederacy, half-adopted ‘Caliban’ Lowell and had him to stay in his ramshackle home, Benfolly in Tennessee. It’s clear that his long ...”

“... Deep South. My first job in New York was on the copy desk at a celebrity weekly where I put in and took out commas and wrote the occasional headline: ‘It’s 2 a.m. in Hollywood – Where Are the Bush Twins?’ The woman who sat behind me and wrote in her free time about female boxers today raises rabbits and sells them for meat somewhere in the Great Lakes ...”

“... were excitedly vulnerable to the charms of fame and what came with it, and the men – who, as John Peel (not obviously an abusive monster) said, ‘didn’t ask for ID’ – took their tribute in sexual encounters without concerning themselves with the age of those they were exploiting. Another tweet caught my ...”

“... material remains, and there were, surprisingly perhaps, a number of antiquaries at Waterloo. They took careful note of the lie of the land as well as the debris on the surface. Walter Scott was there, on his first trip abroad. By August, when he arrived, the site was a tourist attraction doing a roaring trade. ‘Men, women and children rushed out upon ...”

“... separatist territory, Abkhazia. The situation in South Ossetia remained static until Saakashvili took power in 2004. A key part of his appeal, alongside his promises to fight corruption and align Georgia with the West, was his promise to restore the country’s territorial integrity. (In this respect, there is a similarity between him and Putin; there were ...”

“... of us don’t know what to look for, however, and the aerial view is alien to our sense of scale. John Wise, the pioneering American aeronaut, thought he was looking at a waterfall in a pleasure-garden when he saw Niagara Falls from space. ‘I was disappointed, for my mind had been bent on a soliloquy on Niagara’s raging grandeur … The little frothy ...”

“... the two memoirs. Were Picasso able, from beyond the grave, to ban it, he would do so. The idea was John Richardson’s. He provides a contextual epilogue, taken more or less verbatim from the second volume of his mammoth Life of Picasso. Marilyn McCully (who is working on the third volume with Richardson) provides a foreword and biographical notes. Letters ...”

“... happen to our mothers, some things happen to us, but it all happens to us.’ (When she later took the set designer Isamu Noguchi to look at Giacometti’s matchstick sculpture, The Palace at 4 a.m., she was showing him the primal dream of a place. This was the ‘quality of space’, she said, that she wanted for Appalachian Spring. Noguchi gave it to ...”

“... Disarmament and the early British anti-apartheid movement.Over the Easter weekend of 1961 we took part in the CND march from the Atomic Weapons Research Centre at Aldermaston to London. The march, which had first taken place three years earlier, was already becoming an annual tradition. We went through Slough, and one slogan we chanted was a riposte to ...”

“... You’re smiling; you’re wincing; but still a last gasp in you recalls the pleasure you once took in finding out who wins. Envelope-itis. Are we kidding? After four months of the ‘awards season’, reaching from the tarnished Golden Globes to the diligent film critics’ circles in provincial cities (there are a hundred schemes of ...”

“... known stronghold.In 1858, two English ornithologists went to see the great auk for themselves. John Wolley and Alfred Newton travelled to the south-west peninsula of Iceland, hoping to visit Eldey and return with some specimens to add to their collections. Newton even dreamed of capturing a live auk for London Zoo. But their trip was a failure. Bad weather ...”

“... the impression McEwen made in his life. He was born into a Scottish gentry family, the son of Sir John McEwen, Conservative under-secretary of state for Scotland, and his wife, Brigid Lindley. Rory and his five brothers and one sister grew up in Berwickshire in the family’s Palladian mansion, Marchmont. Commenting later on his interest in Redouté, he wrote ...”