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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... past their limits as artists or actors or technicians, and made them propel their material, Richard Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Alistair Cooke’s great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of ...”

“... the Independent Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his ...”