“... worshipped at least one of its characters, the girl Candace, bluntly called the whole novel ‘a grand failure’. However, indulgence is the virtually unavoidable frailty of all scholarly biographers who live too long too closely with their subject, noting, spying, checking, watching, loving, quarrelling, confessing, agreeing for year after year; and this ...”

“... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... etc’. He went to Monte Carlo, for the casino rather than the society: he made no effort to meet grand people in the area such as Somerset Maugham, Picasso or Matisse. Bacon’s new fame and his energetic enjoyment of postwar freedom meant that he had less time for Eric Hall, the Tory councillor, who wasn’t interested in Soho pubs or edgy artists and ...”

“... society was what gave his life meaning, and it’s thanks to his fascination with the rich and the grand that he left such an intimate record. The life Channon describes with such loving relish now seems as remote as Saint-Simon’s Versailles. When he wasn’t visiting country houses and playing sardines – ‘For an hour [at Hackwood] Ld Londonderry, Lady ...”

“... attempt to hide epileptic seizures. The illness was in the family; Dickinson’s nephew, Ned, had grand mal seizures for which Austin unreasonably blamed Sue. Dickinson too suffered from illnesses, Gordon notes. She believes that the cough generally supposed to account for Dickinson’s temporary withdrawal from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was no ...”

“... problem in King of the Badgers, it’s a sort of astigmatism. Hensher has said that he took no grand decision not to include any gay characters in The Northern Clemency, but felt that after a certain point their introduction would unbalance the narrative. He was specifically addressing the reader’s experience of the book: a single gay character in a ...”

“... here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits and scraps. In his letter he continues: ‘But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe ...”

“... and the invention of painting in antiquity (a motif Goya may have derived from the Scottish artist David Allan, one of whose paintings was on board the frigate The Westmoreland when it was captured by French warships in 1779, its contents dispersed in Spain).In 1786, Carlos III appointed Goya a court painter. The opportunities at court, however, were limited ...”