“... dance in a lifetime of silly dances. She claimed that she had once been an intimate friend of George Sand, but there is no reason to believe her. As Morton puts it, Lola was ‘a predator but sadly one who rampaged almost for the sake of it’. At the end of his book, Morton compares her to Becky Sharp, and suggests that Thackeray may have had her in ...”

“... seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says ...”

“... friends’ shortcomings, or their own transgressions. ‘I don’t think he was bad at heart,’ George Sand remarked of Beyle’s habitual cynicism and constant obscenities, ‘he made too much effort to seem so.’ Above all, Beyle wished to be free to feel, to give himself up to ‘agreeable passions’. Free to love and to make love. To other ...”

“... soul. Years later Balzac would produce a telling portrait of the self-torturing romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet – perhaps Goethe’s troubling ...”

“... of the drug is possible, would you set about getting it authorised? Who would you ask? George W. – ‘W’ in this instance standing for ‘When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible’ – Bush? Or perhaps the Queen, within yards of whom, the Evening Standard was shocked to report, other representatives of the supra-legal ...”

“... thirteen, Cumming’s mother, Betty Elston – born in 1926 – was much photographed. Her father, George, a travelling salesman who sold industrial soap, was forever making her pose for shots which he would capture with his Box Brownie. There are black and white snaps of a three-year-old Betty on the beach at Chapel Sands, near the small Lincolnshire village ...”

“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”

“... a triumph of feminism. She told the académiciens in their Napoleonic era uniforms that Colette, George Sand, Madame de Staёl and the salonnières could have preceded her, and the fact they hadn’t wasn’t a consequence of the misogyny of their institution, but of the way it followed the manners of the time, which ‘placed woman on a pedestal, but ...”

“... malefactors: the Outers of Sontag.At other times she was less vehement, and would assume a dreamy, George Sand-in-the-1840s look. ‘I’ve loved men, Terry; I’ve loved women . . .’ she would begin, with a deep sigh. What did the sex of the person matter, after all? Think of Sand herself with Chopin and Marie ...”

“... but not quite to arrive, not to be found in his city ... but to fall before his time on the barren sand (4.620), in Stoic terminology sometimes proficiens but never perfectus.’ In tune with recent trends, the Readings dwell on the second or Iliad half of Virgil’s Aeneid. Inevitably, this chronicle of savage warfare and political imbroglios has occupied a ...”

“... Sir Richard Attenborough is the common factor. Bergen was his co-star in a film called The Sand Pebbles, shot on location in the Far East. Out of hours, while the other actors, Steve McQueen amongst them, were busy getting drunk and chasing women, Dickie (bless him) was ‘acquiring art and informing himself on the island’s politics, making ...”

“... his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to stand for election to the French National Assembly on the grounds that as long as women remained ‘under the tutelage and the dependency of a man’ they could not be free political agents, to the Roman popular tribune Angelo ...”

“... quickly. ‘Nothing in art must look like an accident, even movement,’ he wrote in 1886; while George Moore reports him as saying: ‘No art is less spontaneous than mine. Of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing.’ At the same time, he was always experimenting, pushing the form – whether it was painting or monotype or even ...”

“... Polish forces that have occupied the site since US troops handed over to them in September 2003. Sand bags have been filled with deposits ‘containing shards, bones etc’. Gravel has been brought in from elsewhere to make car parks and helicopter landing pads, contaminating the archaeological record. Fuel has leaked into the ground. Nine of the moulded ...”

“... It’s a place I’ve known since early childhood: mysterious and very beautiful, like the sand dunes across the estuary, running along the edge of the Atlantic. The marram grass in front is broken by one huge hollowed-out dune like a great natural amphitheatre, except it must be the work of the tribe who lived there in the sixth century. That ...”