“... haggard tourists, sleek servants, billionaires’ children, dark, hoarded property. The golden stone of its modest neoclassical façade, designed by Robert Edis in 1883, blends into the street front overlooking Green Park. If you had to guess what lay inside you might hazard a hedge fund, or a tax avoidance ...”

“... great things? Augustine’s rhetorical question, posed near the end of The City of God, launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection. The martyrs who so publicly and bloodily died for their faith are ...”

“... At the beginning of Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities a well-dressed couple arrives at the scene of an accident on a busy street in Vienna. The lady is uncomfortable, ‘had a disagreeable sensation in the pit of her stomach, which she felt entitled to take for compassion’. The man, after a pause, says: ‘These heavy lorries they use here have too long a braking-distance ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Best Man and, beginning in the late 1960s, an impressive roster of American writers, including Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth and Garry Wills – whose analyses of Nixon, Reagan and Wayne blazed the trail for Nixon at the Movies – took him on as a character. Pundits have searched for ...”

“... or the Virgin Mary. Ted Hughes wrote a poem for the same place on the same occasion, incised in stone, in the square with Larkin’s. The poem does not feature in this handsome slim collection, at least I don’t think it does, for Hughes was not the Laureate at the time, and these are his Laureate verses. But as it happens, the little commencement epigraph ...”

“... books indicate. I would not bring up this point if Private Eye were not such a glasshouse of stone-throwers. McKay quotes a colleague saying of the new editor: ‘I don’t think people like midgets, especially pushy midgets’: this editor is also despised for losing his hair too early in life. Richard Ingrams, the previous editor, is condemned for his ...”

“... weaves together the lives of the famous, the obscure and the forgotten. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning plan their elopement. Samuel Rogers entertains the Gräfin Hahn-Hahn, a romantic novelist who has come to meet her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a ...”

“... religions; and the changes from one practice to another, like the change from long barrows to stone circles, or the later and sudden abandonment of henges, even the ‘superhenges’ that had taken a huge amount of labour to create, may have been the result of upheavals fully as great as the conversions of pagan Celts and Anglo-Saxons to ...”

“... experience: for many years he had a house in Vermont where he taught himself to build dry-stone walls. There’s a sense in which his approach to cultural history resembles the careful methods of a craft in which so much depends on the builder’s eye for shape, size and weight, and on the fine sense of contour which ensures that each undressed ...”

“... than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than Harrison’s vigorously clanking sonnet sequence in which the rhymes ...”

“... of literature like a meteorite out of a cloudless sky, our very own qibla, our inscrutable Black Stone. That the first surviving Western poetry, born within a generation or two of the alphabet, should also be so well-achieved is astonishing. There is nothing tentative about the opening books of the Iliad or the Odyssey, no indication that these are ...”

“... label round his neck now. Even in its time it contributed more to publicity than to enlightenment. Robert Conquest, as editor of the group’s anthology New Lines (1956), claimed that what the members had in common was a ‘negative determination to avoid bad principles’. What bad principles? It fell to Davie to define as well as to denounce these evils, or ...”

“... for example, extends an important theory of how things move against their nature (e.g. how a stone continues to move upwards when propelled) to the natural motion of all bodies, including the heavenly bodies. This is the theory of impetus which says that the stone continues to move because an impetus or motive force is ...”

“... particular dream had its price, even apart from the death of the dreamers. It turned hearts to stone, it was part of the old myth of sacrifice Yeats himself used to be so eloquent about. But it also changed the world, and took the dreamers out of ‘the casual comedy’ that seemed to be their life, associating them with a ‘terrible beauty’ that ...”