“... first as mercenaries, for pay, and then as rebels, for land: Hervé (full name not known), Robert Crispin (or ‘Curly’) and Roussel (‘Ginger’) de Bailleul. Roussel – the hero of Duggan’s Lady for Ransom – took part in the Byzantine campaign of 1071 against the invading Turks, which ended in disastrous defeat at Manzikert, but got away with ...”

“... on tomb sculpture, ‘the static intermediary between the earthly and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and ...”

“... James Fox in Bloomsbury Square. There are broad steps on each side of the statue, their Portland stone now stained an aqueous green, and I like to sit beneath and between Fox’s feet, looking, with him, down Bedford Place and towards Russell Square. Like most fat men in statuary (and in life), Fox is seated for greater dignity; he is also swathed in a ...”

“... make the allusion plain: their columns open out into great branches. The idea goes both ways. Robert Frost wrote of his forest of ‘young fir balsams like a place/Where houses all are churches and have spires’. As god is to man, Friedrich seems to say, so man is to nature: we are the ones who shape it, who isolate and set off its beauty. But the ...”

“... pores were dilated; that frequent intercourse opened the passages and was therefore good for the stone; and that if you had a pain in your cods you should avoid chills. Common sense about these sorts of things did not necessarily have to filter down from medical experts to laity, since such knowledge might be an authentic possession of lay culture. In early ...”

“... publisher’ sends on (via email) a letter from her former A-level English teacher, Terence Stone, which establishes another epistolary thread of communication and rumination. The letter, apparently so ‘lovely’ (as a friend observes), activates other, darker, complex strains, including the narrator’s revisiting of her adolescent sexual ...”

“... attempt to identify a ‘real’ Robin Hood was made 130 years ago by Joseph Hunter, who spotted a Robert Hood at Wakefield in 1316-17 and a ‘Robyn Hode, porter’ in the royal chamber in 1324. Since the Gest envisages a tour of the North by ‘Edwarde, our comly kynge’ as the context of Robin’s pardon and entry into royal service, and since Edward II is ...”

“... at the beginning.’ Daily life there ‘added up to one long steady protest’, with poets – Robert Duncan, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder – joining in: the engagé styles that repelled other American writers showed Heaney ‘what it meant to be American. There was a trust that things could be changed.’America meant ...”

“... not given Lord Snowdon’s number but the number he was actually calling from, which belonged to Robert Fox and his wife, Celestia. Fox was arrested. ‘Robert’s been arrested,’ his wife said when she rang Rupert and Min. ‘We were just going to bed, and the doorbell rang. Twelve policemen burst into the house and ...”

“... particular speciality of Hilliard’s, who wished to give ‘the true lustre to pearl and precious stone’ so that ‘it seemeth to be the thing itself’ – but Goldring has a harder job to achieve a comparable close-up of the man himself, who is elusive in ways that go beyond the usual patchiness of evidence after the passage of centuries.Like many of the ...”

“... expressed about the attribution.One of the two owners identified at the time, an art dealer named Robert Simon, did produce a press release before the exhibition opened, ‘summarising the ownership, critical and conservation history of the painting’, as he now puts it. In this he rather coyly stated that the picture was ‘privately owned and not for ...”

“... anxiety about how to feel the emotional effect of their sheer magnitude. Too close and we see only stone by stone without taking in the full sweep from base to peak; too far away and we lose the sublime wonder predicated on the sense that something so massive was made discrete block by discrete block. Writing about the ...”

“... heroes from history, toilet articles and rival makes of bicycle’. In the ‘Good’ list were Robert Burns, Amundsen, and the Raleigh. My family favoured the counterparts from the ‘Bad’ list: Sir Walter Scott (‘would-be aristocrat, eventual bankrupt’), Captain Scott (‘English gent who took ponies, came second, died’), and the BSA. Deep ...”

“... on the floor of a green sea, in a dry landscape, Abandoned buildings, deserted barns Of grey stone, among grey houses, within grey villages, But inside pink or white or painted by the sun coming through stained glass. Little Romanesque shrines with stocky frames, like craftsmen shaped by their labour, Pascal’s invisible church, sewn into canvas, And ...”

“... a conservatory and a formal garden with ornamental pool, framed by an ironwork replica of the stone colonnade in Parc Monceau, the setting for Quarrelling (1875-76), The Convalescent (1875) and Holyday (1876). Edmond de Goncourt wrote that Tissot kept champagne on ice outside his studio for visitors and employed a footman in silk stockings to shine the ...”