“... the Wolfson Foundation and the British Government. I have condensed this latter-day story from Robert Knox’s 1992 monograph, which for the first time gives a detailed description of the whole Amaravati collection, including the pieces still in storage. The publication of Knox’s beautifully illustrated book, which builds on the work of a museum ...”

“... In the National Gallery you can look into a dark and very ancient stone chamber where there is a teenage girl of exquisite beauty, wearing white satin and kneeling upon a velvet cushion, blindfold. She is supported, tenderly, by a gentleman in a black cloak and looked on by a large man in red tights who holds an axe ...”

“... tat. Boots and bricks survive, but little that is articulate – just a few formal inscriptions on stone, a few lead tablets inscribed with curses and buried for the attention of the powers below. Everyday communications, on wood or papyrus, have rotted away. Or so it might have been thought, until in 1973-5 the Vindolanda tablets turned up, preserved ...”

“... disappeared as it has been surrounded and overlaid by successive Chinese visions of the modern. Robert Barnett’s experience of Lhasa does not go back as far as the Dalai Lama’s memory: he first visited in 1987, as a tourist on a not very profound search for enlightenment. He never got to the cave where he had planned a week of meditation. Instead, on ...”

“... Robert Ferguson’s title has already been used at least twice for Viking-related works, which makes one wonder about his subtitle: what’s ‘new’ in Viking studies? The history of the Vikings has been well known, in outline, for a long time. By early medieval standards, we have very good documentation for it, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Frankish and Irish annals, with further contributions from Arab and Byzantine sources, while the Icelanders’ passion for sagas and poems means that we also have versions of the Vikings’ side of the story ...”

“... justice department to investigate Cohen’s father-in-law. But the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has stayed on course, and on 25 January another close associate of Trump, Roger Stone, who professed to have advance knowledge of a WikiLeaks release of the DNC documents, was arrested in Fort Lauderdale. ...”

“... things a clue to their origin or were they the product of a process of mineralisation underground? Robert Hooke made early use of microscopy to identify cells in what could thereby be identified as fossilised wood, and Nicolas Steno dissected a shark’s head to demonstrate that the well known fossils called glossopetrae, ‘tongue-stones’, found embedded in ...”

“... made contemporary poets self-conscious about their crudities, afraid to rhyme “bone” with “stone”, or to go umpty-umpty-um. Marianne was doing her best, one saw, to go umpty-umpty-um when she sensed that La Fontaine had gone that way, but it seemed to be almost – I use the word again – physically impossible for her to do so.’ The endeavour to ...”

“... the record’s contents. He’d been using the alias since the summer of 1960. His given name was Robert Zimmerman and he had grown up in Hibbing, a small mining town in Minnesota; he was the son of Abe, an electrical goods supplier, and Beatty, and the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The name he chose has often been said to be a tribute to ...”

“... to take on Kafka, whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and Dirk Bogarde tell tall tales from Los Angeles, where, as Mr Bogarde says in his foreword, anything can happen and anything and everything does. My Search for Warren Harding, Mr Plunket’s first novel, is described on the jacket as ‘The ...”

“... Bourgeois went to Italy to work on her marble sculpture Blind Man’s Buff, a thick chunk of stone mounted on a rough-hewn wooden base. The marble torso (what else to call it?), adorned with drooping protrusions, crumples and scrunches over on itself. The plaster maquette for the sculpture was modelled on a latex piece from 1978: the ‘costume’ listed ...”

“... time.’ (Dave Van Ronk said that.) That must be how every interviewer feels – except, it seems, Robert Shelton. It’s 1966: Dylan is talking to Shelton, whose book about him he has agreed to countenance, if not to ‘authorise’. He says something about his relationship with Joan Baez, and then asks: ‘Can you write this in your book? If you ...”

“... a former head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone): ‘Only Newton’s laws of motion may enjoy a wider scientific consensus than a human-enhanced greenhouse effect.’ There isn’t consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part because so many ...”

“... of petitioners’ threats to burn down this person’s house or shoot that man. In East Yorkshire, Robert Sharp had a stone thrown at him by a female pauper who had been ‘stopped in her pay’. The poor, King insists, were not ‘other’: they belonged. Even after 1800 they ‘remained fellow creatures’ inside a social ...”

“... but it is hard to imagine the effective translation of his compositions into real reliefs in stone or metal (as has been done with paintings by other artists). There is no evidence that he tried his hand at sculpture, so it seems ridiculous to describe him as a ‘sculptor manqué’, as Alpers does. To strengthen this claim she remarks parenthetically ...”