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“... every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see.’ She goes on to invoke George Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’, translating his figure of the life touched by God into secular terms: ‘But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy – to make life endurable and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick”.’ Some of ...”

“... specimen. Nonetheless, it is clearly a landscape: there is grass, or scrub, and a tree, and yellow sand. Above the horizon there is a black sky, though sharp light illuminates the landscape itself. At the very centre of the painting black paint rises like a flapping, swirling creature with another amorphous daub below it. ‘What they surely represent,’ the ...”

“... also contributed a paper to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on the use of sea sand containing organic compounds for fertiliser. The essay includes a ‘project’ for the increased use of such sand and, as Novak points out, is very much in Defoe’s projecting mode. There was an anti-monarchical bias in ...”

“... off with a selection from Glamorous Night. Then, having played themselves in, they accompany Uncle George, my father’s brother, in some songs. Uncle George is a bricklayer and has a fine voice and a face as red as his bricks. He sings ‘Bless This House’ and ‘Where’er You Walk’, and sometimes Grandma has a little ...”

“... sky thick with ethereal birds of prey and a terrible smell that hit them harder than a fistful of sand in the face, a stench that made them want to hawk it up before it reached their guts, that made them want to stop and turn round.The whole latter part of the sentence is grammatically unsupported, cantilevered over empty space.This is not the long sentence ...”

“... but a makeshift coathanger he has rigged up over the bath in order to dry his anorak.14 January. George Fenton tells me of a memorial service he’s been to at St Marylebone Parish Church for Maurice Murphy, the principal trumpet of the LSO, who did the opening trumpet solo in the music for Star Wars. The service due to kick off at 11.30, ...”

“... style and under the same rubrics. The setting out of the textual notes, no bigger than grains of sand silting across page after page, discourages even the specialist trying to get her bearings. Selection of texts to collate is capricious; no attempt is made for example to collate the 1691 printing of Valentinian with the manuscript sources and the version ...”

“... pull off the desired result in six months, an assurance which Eden, especially in the light of George Bush’s subsequent experiences with Saddam Hussein, can perhaps be for given for not believing. Enraged by Eden’s disingenuousness and frustrated at being sidelined on the eve of an election in which he was to be ‘the candidate for ...”

“... captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –    ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ The sand of the desert is sodden red –    Red with the wreck of a square that broke – The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,    And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks,    And England’s far, and honour ...”

“... picture, Two Girls against Red (1960), is done with pastel on sandpaper. (The binder clings to the sand, giving a tiny depth of field.) The girls, their heads together, each with an arm slung around the other’s neck, have eyes fixed on the present. In all Joan Eardley’s paintings of the Samson children, they seem to have some common knowledge only the ...”

“... of plants. Grasses can be found from Alaska to Antarctica, from coastal salt marshes and desert sand-dunes to tropical forests and the Tibetan mountains. Exceptionally speciose (more than ten thousand species have been formally described), they range from tiny herbaceous plants to the giant, woody, perennial bamboos of China’s western forests. They ...”

“... this reprint. That’s the kind of silly stuff only you can like.’ It was a review of a book by George Kingsley Zipf, an eccentric Harvard scholar, whose eponymous law concerns word frequencies in any language. For written English, the most frequent word (rank 1), ‘the’, will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word (rank ...”

“... special. Its binding emits a supernatural glow, and – rather like Borges’s ominous ‘Book of Sand’ – its contents don’t seem to end: ‘each time I opened the Book of Fish what amounted to a new chapter miraculously appeared.’ Purportedly written by one William Buelow Gould, a 19th-century ‘recidivist convict artist’, the book contains a ...”

“... He was trying, sometimes precisely and sometimes with unbelievable slackness, to tell us, like George Meredith in his day, what he knew about ‘modern love’, and to find narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the slackness may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches of the novels that are neither ...”

“... and radical LA seemed either to have succumbed to decadence, or to have run into the sand. Yet like many veteran leftists, Davis and Wiener are good at pointing out forgotten victories as well as dissecting defeats. They cite a successful local campaign in 1969 against the proposed redevelopment of Venice, the city’s ‘last poor beach’, from ...”