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“... are melded with the monumental – as though one of Picasso’s neoclassical girls-on-the-beach scenes had been taken over by one of Gillray’s grossest caricatures. San Clemente stands as a link between the first and last of three frames into which Guston’s work naturally settles. The first is 1930s left-wing rhetorical social realism – Guston ...”

“... is a collection of first and second-hand accounts, edited by Nathaniel Philbrick, with his father Thomas. Owen Chase’s narrative (which Philbrick and others before him, including Melville, have presumed was ghost-written) has long been the main source of the Essex story, but here it is bolstered by the ‘Desultory Sketches’ of ...”

“... an inexorable threat. Yet Whitehead’s own life and family history – three generations with the beach house in that affluent black enclave in Sag Harbor – would seem to complicate such a dismal picture. This brings us back to Rankine’s assessment: the culture really is invested in interrogating (if not dismantling) centuries of white dominance. This is ...”

“... and Austria were demanding to know: should they use force to stop them, or let them proceed? Thomas de Mazière, her interior minister, was at home ill. Seehofer, still furious at Merkel’s failure to attend the celebration of what would have been the CSU deity Franz-Josef Strauss’s 100th birthday, had switched off his phone. Merkel, watching on her ...”

“... few drinks in the bar (Campbell, remember, is teetotal). His corpse was discovered washed up on a beach the next day. McAra lived in Balham; his mother was named as next of kin in his passport. In the chunkiest biography of Lang that the narrator consults, McAra has only five or six entries in the index: there’s ‘no reason in other words why anyone ...”

“... Before lunch there was swimming, and the vague sense of being sized up. The host reclined on a beach chair under an umbrella dressed in a faded denim shirt and a pair of ancient, stained trousers, his white hair immaculately whipped above a face somewhat hidden by a pair of huge Imelda Marcos dark glasses – this combination of tremendous care and ...”

“... is also careful to document Austin’s intelligence failures. The most consequential was Omaha Beach. Allied intelligence (not just Austin’s unit) thought Omaha was defended by an Ost battalion of non-Germans, with low morale and poor equipment, whereas it was in fact defended by a crack grenadier regiment supported by artillery from two additional ...”

“... cremated his dusky bride by the shore of a tropic sea, but he was to cremate Shelley on an Italian beach in circumstances hardly less theatrical. He may not have been a brigand in the East, but he was to share the life of brigands in Greece. The Adventures of a Younger Son, published in 1831, was written some years after his Greek experiences had given him an ...”

“... Thomas Mann’s​ most noteworthy appearance in Irish letters until now came in one of the last poems of W.B. Yeats. In the spring of 1938 the poet read a piece in the Yale Review by Archibald MacLeish, the only article on his work ‘which has not bored me for years’ – a disarming piece of Yeatsian egotism since most of the article was not about him ...”

“... execute all things. Both the word and the island of Utopia were the teasing inventions of Sir Thomas More. More’s vision of the good place which is no place may have been inspired by the voyages of Columbus’s follower Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of Venezuela and, absurdly, managed to adorn with his name both of the continents of the New ...”

“... analyses of the poems, Murray is alert to nuance and paradox. He notes, for example, that ‘Dover Beach’ – with its Tiresian despair – was written by ‘a young man, happily married, on his honeymoon’. Exactly what kind of ‘clash by night’ was Arnold thinking of? Enlightening as his commentary on the poems is, Murray makes little attempt to ...”

“... than paranoid, less is left out and there are more loose ends. There’s also an explicit debt to Thomas Browne, and his inclusive curiosity. Threads made me think of Thomas Nashe and his pamphlet ‘Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe’, about Great Yarmouth and the ‘praise of the red herring’. It’s hard to write about Norfolk ...”

“... and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923) had two virtues and one substantial demerit. The virtues were a carefully written introduction by Joseph Conrad, which treated Crane as a major writer, and Beer’s lively and vigorous ...”

“... Fritz August von Kaulbach of her as a Pierrette with her four brothers as Pierrots. ‘The young Thomas,’ Katia wrote in her book Unwritten Memories, who was 14 years old at the time the picture was done (I was six), was still living in Lübeck and, like so many others, saw the picture in a magazine. He liked it so much that he cut it out and tacked it ...”

“... the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure. The tourist class was invented by Thomas Cook when he assembled an excursion to the Paris Exposition in 1855. Tourists change their places in groups, live as comfortably as possible, take pleasure in gregariousness, obey injunctions, keep to the main roads, and fulfil plans made by tour-promoters ...”