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“... sister of the Thomas Cromwell who went on to become Henry VIII’s great minister. Morgan’s son Richard entered his uncle’s service and changed his name to Cromwell in 1529. (Occasionally Oliver referred to himself as ‘Cromwell alias Williams’ – even on his funeral effigy he is described as ‘Of the name Williams, of Glamorgan, and by King Henry ...”

“... this or that physical attribute, or name, or occupation, or address. Readers familiar with Richard Ellmann’s biography of 1959 will be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after ...”

“... hills are shadows and they flow,’ Tennyson reflects. One of Pater’s heroes, looking at the stone of his college window sill, observes that the very fabric of the ancient university city is composed of millons of dead bodies. The extended visions of the past which the new art museums also provided could paralyse as well as inspire. To think of Cuvier ...”

“... to stay at Easter. He looked after his own field boundaries, layering the hedges and mending the stone dykes, and when I told him one evening that the blackthorn was flowering already down by the river, he exclaimed: ‘I shall have to get down there in morning! Sap will be rising.’ So variety of work and good conservation went hand in hand. Now a ...”

“... a more urgent necessity. It allowed Michael Herr, on assignment in Vietnam for Esquire and Rolling Stone, to write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a startling account of the collapse of Sixties idealism. No one ...”

“... exhilaration was felt in Britain. Australians who had felt themselves to be in exile here, such as Richard Neville, the editor of Oz, hurried home to help with the crusade. Germaine Greer briefly ceased to knock her own country. Almost anything seemed possible. In three years, the dream collapsed, in circumstances that had a lasting effect. On 11 November 1975 ...”

“... everywhere confronted with the phenomenon of text-laden buildings – of inhabitable books made of stone, brick and stucco. A literate courtier walking through the palace of the Alhambra would learn from one of its towers that ‘Nothing can match this work’, while the boast of the Fountain of the Court of the Lions is: ‘Incomparable is this ...”

“... and Hellenistic ages. The site’s monuments and memorials, known today through inscribed stone blocks that once supported bronze and marble statues, are markers of historical turning points. The statues were long ago carted off to Rome and Constantinople or melted down for their metal, but in other respects Olympia’s archaeological record is ...”

“... the tomb of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, beheaded in 1322, while Yorkists venerated their archbishop Richard Scrope, executed in 1405. Despite periodic repression, both cults persisted until the Reformation. Another class of dubious martyrs were children supposedly murdered by Jews, such as the hapless William of Norwich in 1144. William’s cult, obsessively ...”

“... yet somehow distinctive, relatively easy to identify (Norman Foster, along with his former partner Richard Rogers, is English for Architecture). No wonder corporate and political leaders hire this stylish practice: there is a mirroring of self-images here, at once technocratic and innovative, that suits client and firm alike. ‘Foster’ offers an ...”

“... worked for Darwin among others, Hawkins worked on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs with the scientist Richard Owen, who had coined the word ‘dinosaur’ (from the Greek deinos, ‘terrible’, and sauros, ‘lizard’) in 1841. Theirs was the first attempt to revivify dry fossil bones and even drier scientific discourse for a large public. Though the sculptures ...”

“... it is only a spectral presence. Woolf’s thinking was done more often on downland than paving stone. Wade must have been tempted to beef up the London part of her life with some of her city evocations, but I’m glad she didn’t succumb. The street-haunting essay is fascinating about the glide of the writer’s eye; less so about anything on which the ...”

“... from excavations that hedges of thorns go back at least to Roman times and there are earth-and-stone equivalents in Cornwall datable to the Bronze Age. Yet another mantle of myth is torn off the Romans. Rackham’s picture of Roman Britain is not at all the popular one of a wild frontier province with cultivation confined to occasional clearings in more or ...”

“... it was sanctioned by Kennedy himself in mendacious leaks to favoured journalists and then set in stone in his younger brother’s dramatic narrative, Thirteen Days. Bobby Kennedy’s posthumously published account, which made much of his own role as a voice of reason, was buttressed by hagiographers of the Kennedy court, notably Arthur Schlesinger, the ...”

“... the walls of Kabul, made of warm, sagging, straw-flecked mud: they are rigid blocks of grey-white stone. Foreigners have consistently perceived this aspect of the city as – in the words of the French gem-hunter Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1640 – ‘not very handsome’, or, in the words of Bartholomew Plaisted in 1752, ‘very disagreeable to ...”