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“... ceremony to collect the prize. Except that the rambling, shambling figure at the podium wasn’t Thomas Pynchon at all, but a comedian and actor, ‘Professor’ Irwin Corey, who had been hired by Pynchon’s publisher to impersonate the novelist. The audience gradually got the joke as Corey, who was once described by Kenneth Tynan as a ‘travesty of all ...”

“... Brighton in 1822. A few years later, Boulogne, on the other side of the Channel, became an early beach resort: ‘You will find whatever you are looking for there,’ Manet wrote to a friend. A postcard of Brighton Beach c.1890. Going to the beach – by train on the new railways ...”

“... The tale of the apostle Thomas is a sea unspeakably vast.’ Thus the Syriac poet Jacob of Sarugh, who lived in upper Mesopotamia in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. The words are stirring but to our ears perhaps surprising, because in the West we think we know Thomas’s ‘tale’ and its significance pretty well ...”

“... the hotel years ago (the American Booksellers Association jamboree was in nearby Miami’s South Beach that year). Will Self and his American publisher, Morgan Entrekin, arrived as I was leaving. The vast expanse of water and the huge hotel behind it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the Peter ...”

“... Cow-shed and Houses on the Palatine Hill is composed as stolidly as a picture postcard; Thomas Jones’s A Wall in Naples is as uncompromisingly frontal as a surveyor’s photograph for an insurance claim: all you see is a wall, a door, a window, the top of what looks like a fig tree, some washing hung out to dry, and the sky. Yet these are pictures ...”

“... Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County is part of the so-called South Bay, south of Santa Monica. It was mostly populated by middle-class white people when I grew up there in the 1950s, and was a good place in many ways. I played volleyball on the beach, and once a year we had surfing, paddleboard and volleyball championships next to the Manhattan Pier ...”

“... customs inspectors would be required to check every container arriving at Los Angeles and Long Beach each day: clearly impossible. But the container system presents problems for smugglers, too: it’s all very well for a worker in the glass factory in Guangzhou to load a few kilos of heroin in with the tumblers and ash-trays; the question is, how’s he ...”

“... Orange’s advertising their products with the grotesque promise that ‘you can e-mail from the beach’ shows how far we’ve come, or gone. As a sociological precedent, Agar suggests the pocket watch. In the 17th century the device was a ‘rarity’: a hundred years later, it was ‘baroque high technology’. One difference, however, is that pocket ...”

“... fleeing the GDR a week before it printed the photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi dead on a Turkish beach. But the commitment to the refugees was always conditional. The worthies of the German press are now rushing to make clear their new vigilance. The mainstream Munich magazine Focus printed a photo of a naked white woman with black handprints on her ...”

“... flying as there were tricoleurs or EU flags, as well as adverts for the golf course at Omaha Beach. There weren’t any queues at the Musée de la Tapisserie; we bought our tickets and went straight in, turning down the offer of audio guides, trusting to the succinct Latin captions (or tituli) stitched into the tapestry: ‘hic eadwardus rex ...”

“... Sand Water muscling to shore at twilight, Muscling over her ribs, the water so warm For September. Thomas Paine said, We just couldn’t stay boys (regarding the colonists) Or something to that effect. Ladybugs gather, covering a pear, Gulls screech about the deserted lighthouse. How agreeable to discover Someone loves you, or even later, That you’ve become a fixture In someone’s stable of influences ...”

“... has broken into his house is prevented from committing an act of violence by a recital of ‘Dover Beach’. In The Literary Animal, McEwan discusses Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and the evidence it provides for a universal human nature. This leads on to the insight that the ‘human essence’ of Penelope’s reaction to ...”

“... she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s more fitfully imaginative book lacks, but both have virtues which come directly from the fact that the substantial historical scaffolds which they have erected give their players room to move. The Letter of Marque opens with Jack Aubrey dismissed the ...”

“... through the haze, waiting for the boat. Fishermen poled their pirogues onto the brown strip of beach. A couple of women slouched over baskets of mangos. A boy wandered by to ask for money, then posed for a photo, droop-lidded and smirking, his dog-tags glinting in the twilight. Shiny SUVs with corporate insignia piled up along the loading ramp behind ...”

“... The double centenary​ in 2012 of the publication of Kafka’s The Judgment and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was marked only, to my knowledge, by a single conference, in California. Yet these two stories represented crucial breakthroughs for writers who came to dominate the German literature of the age. Both experienced a creative liberation thanks to forces seemingly beyond the conscious efforts that were getting them nowhere – in old-fashioned terms, thanks to inspiration ...”