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“... heroes the solace of willing nymphets and smooth-shouldered boys, then give them marble busts and sapphire crowns. Behind the curtain of snow lay temperate air and a firepit, and what heroes, after labours, really want: a couple of apple trees; a brook; warm shade where hardwoods stand; a stump for a table; crisp weather; a place to sit down. Chlorophyll ...”

“... the way you taught me to pluck my unsightly moustache   with a tool you bought me. I bought us a sapphire, flawed,   (though you did repay me) from a thief on the Ponte Vecchio.   Good breeding made me share the new tent with Aileen   while you and Hartley, in the leaky, unpatchable other,   were dampened nightly. If I weren’t virgo ...”

“... as opposed to the word ‘writers’ because, while I’m sure Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan and Sapphire could have a perfectly nice conversation, I’m equally sure that their books, if given their druthers, wouldn’t be caught dead on the same shelf.Depending on your point of view, the phenomenon of black women’s writing could be said to have begun all ...”

“... of value gain efficacy from vehicles of value: crushed lapis lazuli, or Mary’s blue, ‘the sapphire that turns all of heaven sapphire’, was the most expensive pigment in the world after gold. I remember visiting the cathedral in Zaragoza: the sacristan swung open the huge heavy doors of the treasury, where gifts to ...”

“... at his most secular, and therefore at his best, when hunched over water. In the Pisan Cantos, sapphire has paradisal associations derived ultimately from its appearance in Dante’s Purgatorio. Not so, or less evidently so, in Canto 91: The water-bug’s mittens petal the rock beneath, The natrix glides sapphire into ...”

“... Marilyn inside it on the grating), the ruby slippers, and a re-creation of the diamond and yellow sapphire necklace worn by Kate Hudson in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, designed by Harry Winston, the show’s sponsor. The last is the only item on show that’s not ...”

“... colours and, bewilderingly, a ‘composite hardstone sculpture of a Chelsea pensioner’, with sapphire eyes, the last Fabergé purchase Edward made before he died. There is the cigarette case that Alice Keppel gave to Edward, red gold overlaid with royal blue enamel, engraved with a diamond snake holding its tail in its mouth. Two little owls on a gold ...”

“... and splendid as the noble bird that bears as many eyes on its august blue tail as stars are in the sapphire vault, O you who summarise their beauty in just two! For Lorca, ‘Góngora is not easy, but he is intelligible and luminous . . . Even on the rare occasion when his hyperboles go overboard, they always have characteristic Andalusian grace and wit ...”

“... jacket, essentially in sepia but with rosy lips and penetratingly blue eyes (‘the most beautiful sapphire blue eyes I have ever seen,’ Shaw called them) can be construed as symbolic: the sepia for his humdrum life, the red for his many passions, the blue for his heaven-storming otherworldliness. Prideaux’s virtues have their downside. There is no ...”

“... whence the shadows fell’. By the end of the tale Mossy and Tangle have grown old. They find a sapphire keyhole in a rock, turn their golden key in it, enter the rock, and climb up and out of it, emerging in a rainbow where ‘beautiful beings of all ages climbed along with them.’ As the story ends they are still climbing, but there is a strong ...”

“... humorous episodes, such as when she startles the mount of a splendid dervish wearing a cape of sapphire blue – he is unseated and writhes in the dust, to the hilarity of everyone watching. She had written in Passenger to Tehran that travel is intellectually a worthless activity, but it has a strong taste, and this stimulates her to a preposterous ...”

“... paper. As a vehicle for discussing the experience of West Indian immigrants, Nead’s choice of Sapphire (1959) – a ‘colour bar problem film’ according to the BFI’s Monthly Film Bulletin – is odd because its specificities are evidently unusual. A thriller about a murdered ‘lilyskin’, a mixed-race woman who can pass for white, it is however ...”

“... his friend’s acquisitive desires, which took very specific forms: fine paper, enamelled glass, a sapphire ring in a small sealed box (‘Everyone says the stone is a real find’), Greek books, precious stones, paintings of ancient history, a crane’s feather. Sometimes Dürer’s exasperation reaches out across the centuries: ‘I have tried my hardest ...”

“... The sun​ still sparkles on the sapphire sea at Mamallapuram. The shoppers and sightseers still dawdle along the harbour front, gawping at the astonishing sculptures carved on the rocks behind: the gods and goddesses, bare-breasted and smiling; the lions, water buffalo, cobras and, of course, elephants. Nothing much has changed since the seventh-century poet Dandin, the greatest Sanskrit storyteller, sauntered along the prom ‘with eyes blossoming wide in wonder ...”

“... girl noted that as the green shade intensified, the moist live flowers turned an even deeper sapphire blue. The Thompson women trusted Artley, however, and wanted her to know their story. They sent her their diaries and notebooks – on which most of this book is based – and spent two years talking to her, looking at old photographs and wandering ...”