“... scale and the scarcity of water must have been terrifying to anyone crossing it by beast or on foot. On a hot day, water is sucked straight out of your skin, and you can feel how fast dying of thirst could be, but the aridity is what makes the air so clear, what opens up those fifty-mile views. Now with air conditioning and interstates and the option of ...”

“... of the Glenn Pool oilfield nearby. The self-proclaimed Oil Capital of the World, where J. Paul Getty began the career that made him the world’s richest man, had seen its population grow 300 per cent over the previous decade, from 18,000 to 72,000 people. Around 10,000 residents were African Americans living in Greenwood, a flourishing neighbourhood ...”

“... him. In the reminiscences of his friends, he figured as absent-minded, cuddly (he was only five foot – podgy, bespectacled), shy, impractical, lovable. The story of his ‘Unfinished’ symphony came to symbolise the tragedy of his unfinished life (he wrote two movements and put them in a drawer, later giving the manuscript to his friend Josef ...”

“... years without carving in an Africanesque mode before returning to the fold to fashion the ten-foot-high King of Kings (c.1938, now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York) with no self-consciousness, it seems, quite possibly sculpting to jazz, since he’d built up a first-rate record collection, mainly of blacks (including Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher ...”

“... does – a little invisible bird fluttering off – when you die. I had the cab let me off at the foot of the block. I wanted to slow things down a bit, take in the neighbourhood. It had been a few years. There were some new, outsize homes built over two lots and extending out to the sidewalk: Graeco-Roman fortresses, my father called them. But it was the ...”

“... private school accent (he and my grandfather were born and brought up in London, and went to St Paul’s) Robin describes the events of a May night and morning near the plantation where he was assistant manager in Kodanad, high in the mountains in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. The previous night a leopard had killed a bullock belonging to one of the ...”

“... inaugural dissertation, ‘Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Aesthetischen’, was sponsored by Paul Tillich and won him his professorship at Frankfurt in 1931. Although he was removed from his post soon after the Nazi seizure of power, he continued to publish articles and reviews – not all of them above reproach – in German periodicals. Towards the end ...”

“... about to take over the known world. Until a month ago, the United States seemed unable to put a foot wrong. Then it, too, showed ominous signs of faltering. Can Japan’s mysterious ailment, whatever it is, be spreading? Japan came third last in the OECD’s table of industrialised and would-be industrialised member nations’ growth for 1999, with 0.2 per ...”

“... the dark towers of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. In the year the Revolution began, this area was known as the Cordeliers district, taking its ...”

“... labelled himself. But he could have escaped the legend to which he had devoted such energies. As Paul Ferris’s excellent biography established some time back, while Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder. He wasn’t martyred by the barbarians of the Inland Revenue: by the time he died Thomas was on the verge of being ...”

“... systems in northwest Europe by forcing them to lodge their claims in the country they first set foot in.The fourth and fifth categories relate to the harm that borders do on the largest scale. By stopping people from poorer countries moving to richer ones, Jones argues, borders perpetuate global inequality, and by turning natural resources into private ...”

“... amputation’.)Silence follows war and the appelés were accustomed to it well before they set foot in Algeria. Born between the mid-1930s and the early 1940s, they grew up in the shadow of economic crisis, two world wars and the German occupation. Many had fathers and grandfathers who had fought in the trenches or in the Resistance. Although the French ...”

“... denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a ...”

“... tied to the ankle with ribbons, and hers are of ‘pale pink, piggy leather’, fastened to her foot with a thick strip of elastic. They notice each other, not least because their ‘shade of brown was exactly the same – as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both.’ So here is difference despite sameness, and a twinning effect. Many ...”

“... were invited to join Unit One, a group of painters, sculptors and architects brought together by Paul Nash to stand for ‘a truly contemporary spirit’ that would, he wrote in the Times, definitively bring together abstraction and Surrealism. But Maclean suggests that the decade’s innovation had already begun with the pink alabaster of Hepworth’s ...”