“... 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 ...”

“... did not dispel the rumours that, as a Republican governor anonymously remarked, ‘he’s like George W. Bush, but without the brains.’ When asked how old the earth is – a Creationist litmus test – Perry said he doesn’t have ‘any idea’: ‘I know it’s pretty old. So it goes back a long, long way.’ They could have picked Bobby Jindal, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... either that hair-pulling in private quarrels was unseemly, or that stuffing chickens with water or sand to increase their weight and thus the profit margin did not befit a shopkeeper. No other Westerner approached the level of knowledge in Chinese culture, language and society attained by Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit, and the subject of an earlier book by ...”

“... Something that started in the 19th century,’ she said. In the autumn of that year Gilbert and George were very agitated on the subject in an interview with the Independent on Sunday: ‘In the 18th century, every man was bisexual,’ says Gilbert. ‘It wasn’t even called that; it was just being a gentleman,’ says ...”

“... reason for putting it on record. Lord Denning also sustains a passing bruise in Lord Archer of Sand-well’s entry on Lord Silkin. Sir Melford Stevenson was famous for stiff sentences, but according to Lord Roskill, ‘those who sat in the Court of Appeal in the Seventies might sometimes find in the appeal papers a letter from Stevenson to the court ...”

“... ancestral spirits breathed life into the land, a life that was celebrated in stories, songs, sand sculpture, ochre paint. Every rock, river, mountain, hill, camp, track and ritual spot on the continent has had many names in its time, so that even the most deserted place has a history. The imprint of the first inhabitants has been overlaid: in the last ...”

“... the aid of a magnifying glass. These writings ‘give one the idea’, she told her publisher George Smith, ‘of creative power carried to the verge of insanity’. The Brontë children’s juvenilia began as a series of plays for performance, but soon developed into rival literary enterprises, each involving a complex apparatus of ...”

“... to talk, to say ‘ta’ for a proffered rusk, my mother would stop me and my other brother, George, from speaking. We all knew what he was supposed to say, but if Richard was ever going to learn, we had to stay silent. The brains of mother and child aren’t separate. If he wanted it, he would have to say so. She would incline her head, lean over and ...”

“... of the exercise was to empower the commander-in-chief to wage his global war on terror. Yet with George W. Bush a president in the mould of William McKinley or Warren Harding – an affable man of modest talent whose rise in national politics could be attributed primarily to his perceived electability – Cheney and his collaborators were engaged in an ...”

“... Firefighters attempted to stop it spreading, digging trenches to halt the fire or pouring a mix of sand, cement and ash into holes they had bored into the ground. But it continued to spread. More holes and trenches were dug. Projected costs spiralled. A dramatic solution was proposed: a pit, three-quarters of a mile long and as deep as a 45-storey building. It ...”

“... his war poems, written far from ‘every loved image of Scotland’ in a place where ‘a foreign sand in History’ is ‘spoiling the machines of the mind’, achieve a remarkable sympathy, very close to love, for those enemies whom he elsewhere derides. The corpses of Nazis in the desert are seen as neoichiontach (‘innocent’) in the poem ‘Going ...”

“... Pinder White, Jonathan Aitken brought on himself a legal action requiring him to kneel on the sand of Viking Bay, Broadstairs, and apologise publicly. JR’s wife, complained the plaintiff, ‘was nothing but a high-class prostitute who drank heavily and was a total alcoholic’. Mrs Hazel Pinder White was not alone in her disquiet. ‘For reasons of ...”

“... that cursed shore when the tigress made her appearance, raging mad almost, and remained on the sand as long as the distance would allow me to see her. Munro was carried back to the ship, but despite the attention of surgeons from the East Indiamen Valentine and General Goddard, both anchored nearby, he died the following day. His body was ‘committed to ...”