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“... traveller’s perspective to a fictional analysis of England and Englishness. His main character, George Grey, is English through and through, from his taste in shirts (Jermyn Street, handmade ‘in a faded, denimy sort of blue’, with his name sewn into the collars ‘like a school boy’), to his taste in food (Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney puddings, heated ...”

“... long way out, turning Morecambe Bay into an extraordinarily impressive and dramatic expanse of sand, sky and distant water, which can look exuberantly Mediterranean in good weather and loweringly, oppressively Nordic when under cloud. The same phenomena turn the Bay, as seen from Bardsea, into a perfect horrorshow for agoraphobics, and I’m afraid that in ...”

“... matter. The poem becomes less autobiographical and more, as Gander once wrote about the poetry of George Oppen, ‘a collaboration with the world’: everything and everyone, in Gander’s psyche, speaks to everyone else. A poet of toothsome words, trying for single lines as solid as rocks, Gander also knows how to describe the way emotions lead to other ...”

“... any decent spa. What the British call sea-bathing is available as thalassotherapy, or, with added sand, as thalassopsammotherapy. Less agreeably, the spas offer heroic irrigations not to be described. The inhalatorium and the gargling-room beckon, and so do the salles de pulvérisation. It is all there for those who have not lost their faith. The Rheumatism ...”

“... family was wary; important witnesses to her life were squeamish about providing testimony. George Bernard Shaw announced that ‘as Edith was an audaciously unconventional lady and Hubert an exceedingly unfaithful husband he does not see how a presentable biography is possible as yet; and he has nothing to contribute to a mere whitewashing ...”

“... That did it. Just as the 1989 revolutions were removing post-ideological Communism from Europe, George Bush mounted Operation Just Cause. The authors neither endorse nor oppose the invasion, regarding it as the ineluctable outcome of the quarrel between senior and junior partners. In justifying Just Cause, Bush ‘mentioned Mañuel Noriega and democracy. He ...”

“... detail; it goes on for years, much longer than his adolescent resolve would have permitted. How George got out of goodness into the comfort of his moral code, his ‘complete normality’, is the substance of the tale. There is a fiery Parksian climax, and an anti-climax. You learn the difference between the story and its narrator: the story knows there is ...”

“... Model Shop, by Jacques Demy. The key scene is pretty much silent – an architect drifter called George getting out of his car, looking down on the city from the Hollywood Hills, the great ribbon of Crenshaw stretching south, Long Beach gone in the smog. Then later, George to a friend:I was driving down Sunset, and I ...”

“... it was dark, and then there was the kiss. And it was warm and sweet, with the ocean smell and the sand between her toes, and she felt better than she had all day.’ It helps, too, that Jamie is secretly Margot’s son, not Yvette’s, and therefore Abby’s cousin rather than her uncle. In A Family Daughter, the incest is a lot less OK: it happens more than ...”

“... benefits of anorexia is amenorrhea, in Josie’s very distorted view.) You are reminded, also, of George Steiner’s comment on Plath’s appropriation of the Holocaust – ‘a subtle larceny’ – when Josie, in Life-Size, makes no distinction between voluntary and involuntary starvation. Fasting, for whatever purpose, or for no purpose at all, strikes a ...”

“... lecturer on the Russian menace. At school at Clifton, his great friend was Henry Newbolt (‘The sand of the desert is sodden red ... The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead’). Younghusband was a natural recruit to the Game, and recruited he was, in 1885, when he was a young army officer at Meerut, by Sir Charles MacGregor himself. In 1886 he was in ...”

“... In 2004, with the re-election of George W. Bush, the Republicans seemed invincible. Bush’s consigliere, Karl Rove, interpreted the election as the sign of a realignment and pushed for a hyperconservative politics which would create a ‘permanent Republican majority’. Now, only three years later, in the midst of America’s absurdly long presidential election cycle, the Grand Old Party is in disarray ...”

“... what he called ‘studio chic’, even if painting out of doors meant getting flies, dust and sand stuck to your canvas. Meissonier became the world’s most expensive painter in his own lifetime; Van Gogh did not achieve that rank until a century into his deathtime. Apart from finding a time of day when the art gallery is reasonably empty, one way of ...”

“... the new edition of My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket remembers being in the room with George W. Bush when he was told that a second plane had hit the Twin Towers. Bush was reading to a group of schoolchildren in Florida and Plunket, then a journalist on the Sarasota Magazine, was part of the press corps. We’ve all seen the footage: an aide ...”

“... made arrangements of different-sized bins filled with varieties of stones or sand.) Nor does he like the work of Charles Simonds, who had films made of himself naked, lying, or writhing about, in clay – a ‘telltale sign,’ observes Kramer, ‘of an immaculate, urban middle-class upbringing’. Simonds moved on to making models of ...”