Search Results

“... Gemstones were prized as much for their occult virtues as for their beauty. For instance, the sapphire, symbolising love of wisdom, cures inflammations of the eyes; placed in the mouth and moistened with saliva, it bestows ‘pure understanding and knowledge’ while also healing the stomach; sewn into a leather sack and worn around the neck, with ...”

“... early in the Second World War: Morning. Full chorus of the birds. A Sun Of nascent ardour in the sapphire dome. Now Memnon’s massive kings with mouths of stone Chant their aubade. Now down the valleys come Innocent minstrels in whose unstained eyes Vision unfolds vibrating like a flower ... Yggdrasil, Jordan and Orpheus follow Memnon’s massive kings ...”

“... pride.’ His poetry, which he seemed quite literally to live for, would restore him – ‘In sapphire arenas of the hills/I was promised an improved infancy’ – and renew America: The Bridge was to be his ‘mystical synthesis of America’. But his pride had been plunged in his family’s shame, and his country, sliding, as he saw it, towards a ...”

“... fragments of newspaper headlines offered up as marvellous found poetry: ‘A burst of laughter/of sapphire in the island of Ceylon’. When I asked a friend about the Surrealist dimension in contemporary poetry, he texted me a photo of a sign in an elevator he happened to be in: ‘When fire hat is lit, return cab to lobby.’ Today the fire hat is always ...”

“... the moment of ease: that did not disappoint. She left the pod on the worktop, glowing like a sapphire on the granite. She had made a list of all outstanding matters to be achieved before ski break was over, and it ran to two pages, but for the next six days her time was her own to arrange. For an hour or so after the family’s departure, their voices ...”

“... Scotland tectonic ages ago and churned southward. Now and again we couch down in the bents, among sapphire glints of milkwort and buttery stars of primroses, and I record my impressions of this long flowery reef in the ocean, the foothold it has been for people, and their own stories. ‘My father,’ Donald MacLellan said 117 years ago, went away with boats ...”

“... moonlightRose on the beach floors.How explicit the coiffures became,The diamond point, the sapphire point,The sequinsOf the civil fans!Insinuations of desire,Puissant speech, alike in each,Cried quittanceTo the wickless halls.Then from their poverty they roseFrom dry guitars, and to catarrhsThey flittedThrough the palace walls.For Stevens such baroque ...”

“... as a student Willa dumped her philandering rugby-player fiancé, Cecil, and flung her diamond and sapphire engagement ring into the sea off St Andrews pier. Willa died, back in Scotland, in 1970. Margery Palmer McCulloch, who wrote this perceptive and sympathetic account in her own old age, did not live to see it ...”

“... secrets of the abyss to spy.He passed the flaming bounds of place and time:The living throne, the sapphire-blaze,Where angels tremble while they gaze,He saw; but blasted with excess of light,Closed his eyes in endless night.One​ could, broadly speaking, describe the history of Western cosmological thinking in terms of three ...”

“... legendary spy chief, was actually the French Philby and there was a whole network of spies (‘the Sapphire network’) within the French Government. A huge and inconclusive hunt was conducted. Then Golitsyn announced the existence of the ‘Sasha network’ in German Intelligence. Another huge and inconclusive hunt. Occasionally, Golitsyn did provide useful ...”

“... met in London, then again at a dinner in Los Angeles, where he told her she should be wearing a sapphire to match her eyes. This time, she got married in a registry office wearing a grey suit. Within a couple of years, Taylor and Wilding had two sons. Clift lavished the babies with presents and friends joked that perhaps they were his, to which he ...”