“... and collect.The usual late 18th-century itinerary for polite travelling and collecting was the Grand Tour, but the young Banks had a different idea. (‘Every blockhead does that,’ he said. ‘My grand tour shall be one round the whole globe.’) At Eton, he had discovered a love of botany (as one does). He followed ...”

“... It was the moment, in the mid-1950s, when worlds were beginning to collide. Tennant’s uncle David ran the louche but artistic Gargoyle Club in Soho, where the old aristocracy mixed with the new celebrity. Princess Margaret met Lucian Freud and Ian Fleming; Tennant’s previous girlfriend, Ivy Nicholson, became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Jeanne ...”

“... It’s got to tear [the audience] apart, scream at them, that’s what my character is.’In David Looseley’s new interpretation, Piaf’s notoriously elusive life story is best told as cultural history. This is a book about Piaf and her crowd. Rather than trying to get to the ‘real’ Piaf, as Robert Belleret did in Piaf, un mythe français ...”

“... golf balls can fit in a school bus?’ or ‘How much does the Empire State Building weigh?’ David Schwartz​ is a science policy expert with a background in physics. His father was the Nobel-winning physicist Melvin Schwartz, who met Fermi in the 1950s and passed on his admiration of the great man. But beyond the physics, as Schwartz admits at the ...”

“... ego in the novel as an excerpt from his supposed poem dated 1860, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. David West in the Times Saturday Review for 24 August 1991, show-casing the piece in a panel headed ‘Reading a Poem’, invited us to see here ‘many of the characteristics of the best Victorian verse: the vivid and disturbing pictures, the rich organ music ...”

“... synonyms every week. It was with characteristic British reserve, though, that Lieutenant-Colonel David Morgan, Commandant of the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Riders, set about straightening things out. The Gurkhas are the British soldiers whom, in an ugly slur, Garcia Marquez accused of committing almost unprintable ...”

“... which plainly made Russia a potential antagonist. Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte Campbell found him ‘devilish handsome’, while others, less frivolously, thought that he might one day put Russia on the Western path of enlightenment. Alas, when Nicholas succeeded as tsar in 1825, he ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... using it, probably fewer than in some other sports. Just before the Tour began, the British rider David Millar – very popular in France, almost unknown in Britain – confessed to taking EPO. He has now been stripped of his world time-trial title. This is the first time since 1978 that no British rider has taken part in the Tour. Suspicions about Armstrong ...”

“... him ‘perpetually resilient, flexible, fertile in device and ready for accommodation within the grand circle of the negotiable’. The key to his politics lay in his mastery of legal skills. He demonstrated ‘the lawyer’s ineluctable concern with the correctness of form and formulae, with legal effect rather than with moral stances or satisfactions ...”

“... the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent sage: its grand aim is to bring under bibliographic control the principal Victorian framers of opinion – namely, the periodicals. Higher journalism, particularly the slow-rhythmed quarterlies and monthlies, were taken by Houghton as the medium in which Victorian ideas ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... to spare description of physical actions and enigmatic moments. Rather than returning to the grand historical reconstructions of Underworld or Libra (1989) – to which readers might uncharitably compare Falling Man’s apparent smallness – it seems that in Falling Man DeLillo has produced a revision of an influential ‘small’ book he delivered ...”

“... were allotted to elected deputies of the people.Chief Pleas has consistently been suspicious of grand plans for reform. This is because tax increases would fall mainly on inhabited property, given tenants’ centuries-old opposition to a bureaucracy capable of administering an inquisitorial income tax. Tenant resistance on grounds of cost delayed all the ...”

“... Harpo and Gummo. Minnie came along for the ride and, as their business manager, felt sufficiently grand to rename herself Minnie Palmer. On a gig one night in Waukegan, Illinois – fabled town: was it not the Waukegan conservatory that taught Jack Benny the violin? – the brothers looked past the footlights and saw at the piano, inexplicably, the wandering ...”