“... is telling enough. Nor are those fractures and alienations necessarily uncommunicative. The grand illusion which, yes, alienates, estranges, both our exceptionally gifted Marxist composers from real people the reader will note without surprise. In Henze’s words, I could envisage composing becoming something that all people could do, simply by taking ...”

“... Overseas service, for which he volunteered, introduced him to life in commandeered luxury liners, grand hotels, special trains. Footloose in Cape Town he spied the first locomotive ever to work in the Cape Colony, a small tank engine built in Leith in 1859. From Bombay he rode 1400 miles by Frontier Mail to Rawalpindi, where he was given a bearer and a dhobi ...”

“... The index is on view in a chamber at the side of a magnificent crypt with a marble Star of David commemorating all six million who died in the Holocaust. The files are on loan from the state archives. A second site opened in 2012. It overlooks La Muette, a housing project in Drancy begun in the 1930s and still unfinished when it was requisitioned by ...”

“... I had satisfied this naive touristic urge there was a disaster to confront. The closure of the Grand Banks cod fishery was slowly overwhelming this large island. Newfoundland’s waters had been exploited by Spanish, Portuguese and Cornish fishermen since at least the 16th century. Theirs was a hugely profitable industry that supplied the whole of Catholic ...”

“... or literary career barely begun, or that authors suffer from the sense of being footnotes to the grand poets of an earlier age. Wilson tells us that the precocious emperor despised the old, mocking the grey hairs on a victim’s head. With everyone in a hurry to make hay while the fierce and unpredictable imperial sun shines, images of excessively rapid ...”

“... and history, wore nail polish and borrowed his sister’s fun-fur jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ...”

“... Behind​ its grand and oblique title, derived rather surprisingly from Kipling, Mathias Enard’s new book is a fictional account, no more than novella length, of a visit by Michelangelo to Constantinople in 1506. Sultan Bayezid II had already commissioned a design for a bridge over the Golden Horn from Leonardo da Vinci, and rejected it ...”

“... one it had been at the outset: how to objectify personal relations in such a way as to sustain the grand collective projects on which individual security was seen to depend. Initially, in the case of the princely state, the individual whose security was at stake was simply the prince himself. Nevertheless, the solution to princely insecurity in a world of ...”

“... properly, behind closed doors. Opera dress rehearsals seem slightly busier than the first night, grand and populous with all the members of the board on view. There are titled patrons and their ladies, and crowds of discreet functionaries discreetly function in an atmosphere of hushed reverence. This is Art with a capital S. The opera was well under way when ...”

“... removal of ruins and the burning of ancient marbles for lime. Other popes followed his example. As David Karmon showed some time ago, the movement to conserve ancient sites in their current state was born in the same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story ...”

“... was involved, Codner wrote, because ‘one of successive British governments’ highest-level grand strategic objectives is to enhance the security of the UK by influencing the execution of US security strategy.’ (He also noted that ‘this objective is not formally stated in public documents.’) In May 2003, Jonathan Eyal, now associate director at ...”

“... Nashville.’ Royalties for the first year amounted to four four-cent stamps; five years later a grand total of 16 copies had been sold. Ammons had been writing poetry for nearly twenty years when his next collection, Expressions of Sea Level, came out in 1963. Then, suddenly, six volumes followed in quick succession, including a Selected Poems in ...”

“... MacArthur is the size of the bet they are prepared to lay. It dwarfs the Nobel’s paltry hundred grand (forget the Booker’s 20K). The winner of a MacArthur receives five years’ stipend amounting to half a million dollars. No strings are attached to this windfall. Nor is any report or accounting required after it has been spent. Laureates can take their ...”

“... and occasionally laying down their trousers in pursuit of their genius. Poofterism has a very grand tradition in England, and though the subject failed to catch the attention of George Orwell, it might have been a nice thing if it had, given its place in England’s emotional life at every level and in every class. Orwell was an old Etonian, so he knew ...”

“... before returning them after the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829. To some, this seemed to signal a grand mission of Asian domination.Erzurum, Yerevan and Baku were a long way from India – even Baku was more than 1100 miles from Kabul. British military strategists did not fear the Russian conquest of India – the army officer George de Lacy Evans ...”