Bung your child a brainy pill with his muesli, the hype goes, and he will become serene, reasonable and perform brilliantly in spelling tests.
Again the hotel became serene and we went back to our sofa to dream of inbound scows between cliffs of gleaming marble.
Without honking horns and speeding taxis, the streets became serene parks, open to throngs of cyclists, in-line skaters and strollers.
From an amplifier in the barrel, the vibrations of sound are sent quivering through the raw spirits, which soon lose the characteristics of youth and become serene and docile.
Once, I stood there in the evening, and as the sun dropped into the ocean, the sky became serene and I could see all the homes on those islands gradually lighting up.
Park the child before Peppa's benign pink hypno-glow on a tablet, and otherwise epic ordeals such as eating out or travelling more than a mile become serene pleasures.
The evening was full of moments when jazz musicians -- singers and instrumentalists both -- gave up part of the battle of high-concept group playing, became serene inside and gave way to the impulse of song.
Dent wrote of Busoni's late Beethoven: "To hear him play these sonatas was an almost terrifying experience; dynamic and rhythmical relations were treated with such vast breadth and freedom that one seemed taken up to heights of perilous dizziness and made, as it were, to gaze steadily into the depths until one's vision became serene".
Not surprisingly, this makes him exceptionally hard to live with, though his tough but magnificent wife and loving band of sons seem to have coped admirably.As for Solzhenitsyn the artist, Mr Thomas makes well the point that the Russian's most powerful creations are drawn closely from his own life; and that when his own life perforce became serene, his creative juices flowed much less freely.
