“... these expeditions. He warned that time to save European culture was running out, ‘not like the sand in a glass, but like the blood of an opened artery’. The ‘common culture of the West’ was being destroyed by book-burning and the exile of European intellectuals. Librarians could no longer be merely custodians. War was being waged against ‘the ...”

“... Arab League. The PAIC meetings attracted people as disparate as the old leftist Palestinian George Habash, members of Hamas, Algerian jihadists and Iraqi Baathists – not to mention Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Then, in December 1992, President Bush dispatched the US army to Somalia on what he described as a humanitarian mission. The ...”

“... where the painter simply turns the framed canvas over and works on and in the back declivity with sand; also in public self-presentation – Picasso at a restaurant table with bread-rolls for fingers. He never lost this side, partly because he wanted to do everything and be everything. Braque knew that he couldn’t do everything, and didn’t want to be ...”

“... perfect sentences, despite being flustered. The mot juste every time, whether discussing a George Herbert poem or ordering in a restaurant. His voice was deep, his words perfectly enunciated if a little over-emphasised from years of teaching. He spoke briefly and discreetly, and obviously did not enjoy the sort of attention being trained on him and his ...”

“... T he notion​ that novelists don’t invent might be recent, yet George Eliot got tired of people pointing to the ‘original’ of Mr Casaubon, who was sometimes said to be Robert William Mackay, a rather pedantic associate of hers at the Westminster Review, or Dr Brabant, a pretentious family man of 62 who had wooed her decades earlier ...”

“... novelists, such as Ian Maclaren and J.M. Barrie, nor the small-town gothic that reacted to it, in George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901) or John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914). Kinraddie, ‘the new minister’ proclaims at the end of the prelude to Sunset Song, ‘was the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a ...”

“... than Kissinger’s example suggests. Stretching from Randolph Bourne and William James to George Kennan and William Fulbright, the pragmatic realist tradition in American diplomatic thought held that it was necessary to consider the consequences of ideas and had an outlook characterised by a humane, cosmopolitan restraint in foreign and military ...”

“... not a surfer: he may have held business meetings in his swimming pool and set up his piano in a sand pit, but he had to be dragged into the sea as if he was undergoing aversion therapy. The Beach Boys’ early hits were the sound of everything to do with surfing, absent the sensation of surfing itself. Surfers try to control unpredictable swells and ...”

“... envelopes, clustered around a postage stamp of a steam engine securing magazine clippings about George Sand. Were these fragments of poems too? Lavinia recognised that she lacked the expertise to sort through the papers, but was determined that her sister’s work should be published. She turned to her sister-in-law, Sue, the woman to whom Emily had ...”

“... the bank was a very profitable business, though it sometimes placed them in awkward positions: George Washington, for example, was a stockholder when the bank was financing the war to put down his rebellion. For the state, having easy access to a huge pool of private capital allowed it to outspend and ultimately defeat France, even though it was larger and ...”

“... it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men already condemned ...”

“... cartoonists all know that desert island = sexually restricted environment, hence the mound of sand, palm tree, curvy lady, unshaven man etc ... In his rewrite, Dryden responded strongly to the idea of a woman who had never seen a marriageable man, inventing, to match her, a man who had never seen a woman (not noticing that in Shakespeare’s play there is ...”

“... rendering of Chinese when I was young to László Krasznahorkai, more recently, in the versions of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, which read enthrallingly in English, though needless to say I have no way of knowing what the originals are like. Many celebrated translators, like Gansel, carry on adding to their linguistic crane bag: Michael Henry Heim, who ...”

“... from, and distinctly harder than, that taken in its dying days by the Reagan Administration. George Shultz travelled to the Middle East this summer to spread the word that ‘the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the frustration of Palestinian rights is a dead-end street. The belief that this can continue is an illusion.’ It is a ...”

“... he is ‘finical, awkward’, concerned only with minutiae, with the ‘dragging grains’ of sand he is condemned to spend his life investigating. Bishop, one suspects, knew rather more about real birds than Shelley did; like Marianne Moore, she prided herself on her ability to capture the feel of different species through accurate ...”