“... John Lennon gave his famous interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine at the end of 1970, a few days before the release of the most important solo-Beatle record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Rolling Stone published the interview early the following year, with the album already in the shops ...”

“... those who have. He that is sure he is free from sin, Prieberg seems to say, let him cast the first stone. Plenty of stones have been cast in the direction of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. The attacks began in 1933, soon after Hitler took power, and continued until well after Furtwängler’s death in 1954. As late as 1983, the New York Times ...”

“... stones which he must tear away to make a hole big enough to crawl through. There is a Greta Garbo stone (he once pelted her with ripe figs), and stones called Gary Cooper, Freddie March and Sylvia Sidney, but one of the biggest and loosest goes by the name of Clara Bow. Vulgar, gum-chewing, and with a comically nasal Brooklyn accent, the It Girl flashed ...”

“... that relationships frequently traversed ethnic or linguistic divides. At Turnastone, a man called Richard Gogh was said to be consorting with various women: Helen, daughter of Trahaearn, and Lleucu, daughter of Einion, and Lleucu Kedy – all probably Welsh – but also with the more English-sounding Margaret Hunt. Another woman in the village, accused of ...”

“... and limitations of the new biology. The book has its scientific antecedents, most specifically Richard Lewontin’s The Doctrine of DNA and Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life; yet it stands alone in trying to reach to the very essence of biology, with its ‘knowable pasts and unknowable futures’, in the best tradition of Italy’s two scientific ...”

“... A Yankee from Connecticut, Sperry repeated a very simple experiment which had been done by Stone at Yale. He removed eyes from amphibia, rotated them by 180 degrees and replaced them. All holistic, co-operative, interactionist predictions would insist that these rotated eyes would adjust to their new environment. The fact is that the animals see upside ...”

“... never have been published at all had it not been for the intercession of the poet and translator Richard Howard, who was introduced to White by a friend who had met Howard at a West Village pick-up bar. Howard liked White’s manuscript, suggested revisions and eventually persuaded Random House to publish it. The publisher demanded that the ending be changed ...”

“... what his job has led him to expect. Yorkshire, 15 March. Having seen there was a Bronze Age stone circle (more accurately the remains of a barrow) at Yockenthwaite I look at the map and see what I take to be a narrow and presumably little-used road over from Hawes. It’s a spectacular day with deep snowdrifts still on the tops where we stop to look at ...”

“... making ambitious claims for the importance of the work and explaining his choice of title. Next, Richard Shone, an associate editor of the Burlington Magazine, perhaps best known for his scholarly work on the Bloomsbury Group, gives a detailed chronicle of the careers of the artists, whom he describes as loosely ‘entwined’ in a single history. He sees ...”

“... with the intent to cut another rose – yellow, if possible – from the rose garden (by the stone lion’s head fountain) just come into bloom – a rose to begin to unbud as the red, almost black-red rose now giving out prodigal scent in our living-room … I leaned to snip a pink bud, one petal uncurling, and three hulking girls came out of the ...”

“... before seen in this country. At times, indeed, it was going up by a thousand a month, which, as Richard Tilt, the director general of the Prison Service, has pointed out, requires a new prison every three weeks to house the intake. If Howard’s Crime (Sentencing) Bill goes through Parliament, it will add between 10,000 and 30,000 prisoners to the present ...”

“... the maiden speech for which he was instantly awarded the Garter. When I joined, I discovered that Richard Adrian is quite right: it is like a prep school. There are any number of corridors down which to get lost. Nobody tells you how to find the Gents, and you’re too shy to ask. The rituals are as arcane to the newcomer as they are familiar to the old ...”

“... of those who practised it. St Louis was crawling with would-be lady writers. There was Mrs Stone, the director of the Modern Novel Club, who had written a pamphlet on ‘The Problem of Domestic Service’: ‘Intentions pile up before her like a mountain, and the sum of her energies is Zero!’ Mrs Hull, the wife of a coal merchant, was sure that if ...”

“... were the essential settings for so many pantomimes and ballets. The key figures in the 1840s – Richard Dadd, Joseph Noël Paton and Daniel Maclise – were not merely concerned to delight. They contaminated their sweet melodies with grotesque comedy, transformed the domestic and familiar – the bird’s nest and the woodland glade – into the furniture ...”

“... from the viewer. For, as with Medusa, if we were to catch her eye we would instantly be turned to stone. In a crucial sense – and in a way Hughes-Hallett does not appear to have realised – the myth of Cleopatra and her destructive power is bound up with the complex significance of the Gorgon. Gorgons, both in Antiquity and later, come in two main ...”