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“... oil, of course, but also many tons of the world’s most mined commodity (can you guess? It’s sand); and, of course, everything else, from widgets to trainers to computers, from coffee to consoles, from plastic crap of all types to medicines to, well, everything. Since 12 per cent of global trade passes through the canal, the economic damage caused by its ...”

“... Port Royal in Jamaica was a new sort of town. A deep-water port, it lay at the end of a nine-mile sand and gravel spit sheltering Kingston harbour. It was a merchant enclave and a pirate enclave, well situated for running contraband and raids against Spanish territories, and more ships docked there in a year than in all the ports of New England. Onto its 50 ...”

“... highly of jokes, and they structured all his exchanges with children; he kept stores of toy sand games and puzzles in his rooms and brought them out to play with his visitors, he could conjure and do card tricks, he knew how to make a paper pistol pop, could produce imaginary animals from a folded handkerchief, pass a halfpenny through a sixpenny ...”

“... and burning the groves with their bloodstained altars – a scene powerfully recapitulated in George Shipway’s novel of the occupation of Britain, Imperial Governor (1968). Hutton is sceptical about most of this, pointing out that several authors seem to be copying each other or sources now lost, that Pliny appears to have been ready to believe ...”

“... a thing Mrs Thatcher, faced with dangers of a similar mismatch, avoided over the Falklands. George Bush has many advantages over both of them, but he will face variations on the same basic question. While his forces are building up in the Gulf there can be time for long closed sessions of the Security Council. Once they are all in place (on Saudi or ...”

“... The Riddle of the Sands, ever stumbled on his experimental establishment on the Pomeranian sand dunes. Longmate draws freely on Dornberger’s book V-2, which will be only too well remembered by anyone who read it. From its pages Dornberger emerges as a combination of soldier, scientist, visionary, poet and clown. Perhaps his book was ghosted, or ...”

“... Mueller teaches in Ohio, one of the now-famous ‘red states’ that elected the warrior-president George W. Bush to a second term, he seems largely oblivious to the fact that a clear majority of Americans consider war to be anything but obsolete. Political elites in the United States came away from the Cold War enamoured of military power. Events of the 1990s ...”

“... a dull farmhouse. Genuine remnants of Leptis Magna were erected at Virginia Water, to please George IV. The divide between antiquity and artifice, ancient and modern, was becoming increasingly blurred. Literary Romanticism, like the Picturesque, borrowed its tone of mystery from the ramshackle ruins of Gothic religious establishments. With a bit of ...”

“... his synaesthesia, his interest in birds), three short reminiscences by former pupils, Boulez, George Benjamin and Hill himself, and Loriod’s interview with Hill. Part Two consists of seven essays, of which three are on individual works: La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Des canyons aux étoiles ... and the opera Saint François ...”

“... loose ends; to vary the metaphor, there is a Ganges-delta effect, or a sort of running into the sand. Two features – two ‘leaks’ – help cause this phenomenon. First, in a biography of Lawrence, it seems to be a mistake to let the stories tempt one into psychologising. To explicate the stories is perfectly proper and may be necessary, but not to make ...”

“... the words in which you say it, by mixing one abstract concept into another as if two kinds of sand could make cement, by suddenly switching to italics as if a breakthrough into clear country had been achieved by hard sweat. Mr Carter’s big idea is that most of the history written about Australia up to now has been imperial history. He has invented a ...”

“... with a complete set of original furnishings, crystal flowers, cellophane curtains and a shrine to George Washington (‘He is the only man I collect’). Like much of her work, her interior design was grand in concept and technically complex but didn’t take itself too seriously. She conjured a European aristocratic past out of flashy, ersatz materials and ...”

“... determination that made Bertie, the stammering, nerve-racked and less than handsome second son of George V, persist in proposing to the woman he had decided, almost on sight, was the only person he would ever marry. With her eventual acceptance Elizabeth, equally determined in her way, had to bypass a number of unattractive facts. The king was a martinet on ...”

“... had gone wide of the mark and crashed through the animal’s eye. As it thrashed around in agony, George had just stood there, quivering and numb. It was left to Dorothy to fetch a clamp, secure the bloody, squealing creature by the nostrils and knock it dead with one almighty swing of the hammer. ‘Men!’ she had muttered, in a scornful tone of voice, and ...”

“... in utopian and dystopian writing – a world apart, for good or ill, as in Aldous Huxley’s Pala, George Orwell’s Airstrip One, the vivisectionist paradise of H.G. Wells’s Dr Moreau, Margaret Cavendish’s polymorphous freakshow in The Blazing World, or William Golding’s reworking of R.M. Ballantyne’s coral island as Beelzebub’s atoll ...”