“... 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 ...”

“... which was said to be the biggest of its kind in the city, was as creepy as its owner. With a stone satyr over the fifteen-foot front door and forty rooms over seven floors, the decor was of the Gothic Quagmire school: according to the FBI agents who raided it at the beginning of July, it contains among other weirdnesses a photo-montage of Epstein ...”

“... called ‘Our Precious Isles’, like a half-remembered allusion to John of Gaunt’s diatribe in Richard II, conjuring the ‘sceptred isle’ and ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’ popular with mawkish patriots who for some reason always stop quoting the speech before they get to the bit about England being ‘now ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spiders; a menacing black servant with eyes glowing like coals; a naked young woman supine on a stone altar, breasts heaving, knife raised over her throat. But only a minority of his novels involve devil-worship; Baker’s title ties together the thing that brought in the money with the obsession that underpins all his work: social class. Wheatley suffered ...”

“... the field and the others were rounded up on the road south, at Stockport or Macclesfield. When a stone was thrown at the prince regent’s coach on his way back from the opening of Parliament that same month, Lord Liverpool’s Tory government enacted another round of repression, suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, thus enabling imprisonment without ...”

“... of Frieda Lawrence, and of her third husband, Angelo Ravagli; above it is the phoenix symbol, in stone or cement, which Lawrence had adopted as his own. There, while the clouds spattered down some drops of rain, and the wind hissed among the swaying pines, an actor and an actress read some of Lawrence’s writings on New Mexico. The actor was dressed in a ...”

“... for ear-rings. There was the bloke I met in Durham Cathedral two months ago who looked like the stone gargoyles he professed to adore, and in Strathclyde I know any number of old folk whose faces resemble nothing so much as a full and hearty tumbler of Grouse whisky. Children are much the same. They can look like their toy rattle – all blue and bumpy ...”

“... Stricken shalbe thy lecheres all; Thy prowd towers and turretes hye, Enemyse to God, beat stone from stone; Thyne idolles burnt, that wrought iniquitie. The poem taps into the zeal of Protestant reformers, but also running through it is the resentful voice of a young nobleman who got caught and who simply cannot ...”

“... in Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery, published his autobiographical novel Cast the First Stone in 1952, but it was at San Quentin Prison that things came to a head. San Quentin had an unusually progressive warden, Clinton Duffy. (Braly’s memoir spells out Duffy’s achievements: ‘he brought in the movies, the school, the hobby programme. He began ...”

“... keen sense of smell. In what reads like an itemised denouncement of the modern (as opposed to the Stone Age?) world and its evils – capitalism, prostitution, Third World poverty, unchallenged scientific enterprise – Homo sapiens has become the real threat to a humane society. This conceit, if a little well-worn, might still have worked had Lessing not ...”

“... When Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, on 7 November 1944, I was still a student and I regret that I never had occasion to take a drink or three with that wit, charmer, womaniser, tosspot, home-wrecker, author, journalist and master Soviet agent. I had better luck with my friend Kim Philby, Sorge’s only serious rival (that we know of) for the title Spy of the Century ...”

“... sizing (applying a protective, anti-absorbent compound) and finishing (rubbing with a smooth stone). In early modern Europe, the process of dipping, removing and tipping took about twenty seconds. An efficient partnership of vatman and coucher might produce four reams (two thousand sheets) of paper each day. There were writing surfaces before ...”

“... There is perhaps no better guide to the dauntingly complex issues involved in these questions than Richard Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects. First published over twelve years ago, this concise, elegant and wide-ranging book has established itself as an indispensable text for undergraduate courses in aesthetics. The second edition leaves the original text ...”

“... Diversions’, Barrell produces two fine chapters on the ‘popgun’ plot and the strange case of Richard Brothers. Just before Hardy’s trial began, the London newspapers carried reports of an attempt to assassinate the King. Three members of the LCS – Peter Lemaitre, a watchcase maker, George Higgins, a shopman, and John Smith, a bookseller – were ...”