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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the first poet to notice a funny thing about shrimps: Shrimps and their shadows on the contoured sand Of the shallows: oddly, the shadows more apparent ... ‘Oddly’ because it suggests something other; the poem will not quite say what that is, though it establishes an otherness. The old man, in one of his manifestations, reports a letter from his teacher ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to a cultured populace, and consumption gives way to creativity. This is the vision with which George Steiner opens his new meditation, Real Presences. His subtitle – ‘Is there anything in what we say?’ – indicates the motivation for this dream of immanence: the desire to reinstate the belief that meaning resides in the artwork and the need to ...”

“... Denning,’ G. replied, ‘is an unfortunate example of a man who built up a reputation on sand.’ ‘That could be actionable,’ said I. ‘I do not care if it is,’ G. roundly replied. ‘It is characteristic of the English legal profession that it should set a man like Lord Denning on a pedestal.’ Here, as elsewhere, a man is condemned with ...”

“... has been some Christian vicar or nature study slant: he has edited selections from Wordsworth and George Herbert and compiled a Penguin Book of Religious Verse. Out of church, he has kept fairly silent, confining his enthusiasms to co-Celts like Yeats and Mac-Diarmid and to the odd American, like Wallace Stevens. Thomas’s favourite Larkin poem, he says, is ...”

“... did we not see Mainwaring’s men, like the people of Margate, filling their bathing cabins with sand to use as roadblocks? Why did we never see them (or did we?) trying out the recommended shibboleth tests for suspected spies by making them say ‘soothe’, ‘wrong’, ‘wretch’, ‘rats’ and ‘those’? Did Perry and Croft ever show us ...”

“... whose work is now entering the mainstream. In a sense, by focusing on the Mandate, Ploughing Sand and One Palestine, Complete are considerations of Israel’s debt to the British and Britain’s injury to the Arabs. Shepherd writes that ‘British rule protected the Zionist beachhead in Palestine during the most vulnerable, insecure period during the ...”