“... so would sit obligingly still on the scales. What the dairymaids referred to as a ‘pound-stone’ or a ‘Chedworth Bun’ was in fact a fossilised sea urchin, Clypeus ploti, and was more than 170 million years old. The Lake District to the York Moors. At 18, Smith was hired as an assistant to the surveyor Edward Webb, and by the age of 25 he ...”

“... Homesick Blues’. Even the leading music journals – New Musical Express in Britain, and Rolling Stone in the USA – have found it hard to adjust to the new era; like the rock industry itself, rock critics are primarily interested in stars or guitars. A song combining computer-generated sounds and 37 shouts of ‘go’ isn’t, I suspect, what turns on ...”

“... shapeless hulk, something like an exhumed crypt, as if the builder had sought to objectivise in stone and cement the disorder of his own delirious mind.’ Here we detect the melodramatic imagination at work, giving rise at every turn of phrase to what Vargas Llosa’s study of Madame Bovary calls ‘a certain distortion or exacerbation of ...”

“... relation between reason and unreason in this area. A recent and distinguished contribution is Robert Parker’s essay on pollution and purification, Miasma. One main feature of this research has been its invocation of comparative anthropology and sociology: not only ancient texts and remains but also the findings of modern fieldworkers have been adduced ...”

“... reflection.As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.As if the eddy could reform the pool.As if a stone swirled under a cascade,Eroded and eroding in its bed,Could grind itself down to a different core.Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never failFor they keep dancing till they sight the deer.The ‘Station Island’ sequence forms the middle section of ...”

“... can, it seems, make excellent translations on any principle at all, free or literal or in between. Robert Lowell was cruelly and unjustly pilloried by Nabokov for his wonderful ‘imitations’ of Rimbaud, Rilke and others. But then Nabokov’s literal version of Eugene Onegin has all kinds of virtues, and is itself routinely pilloried by almost everyone who ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is better than prose. Another ...”

“... from America? Advocates of the ‘natural transfer’ hypothesis, including Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo, credited as the discoverers of HIV, have assumed that Aids was an old disorder which became subject to the medical gaze only when Westerners were affected. And how had that come about? A disease long contained within certain isolated Central African ...”

“... or somebody – some murderer – like that. He had probably misread a communication from Robert (The Great Terror) Conquest. Anyway, it is already pretty clear that one of the chief excitements of this publication will be in finding out who has been dumped on, and how badly. Few well-known names escape the Larkin lash and although Anthony Thwaite ...”

“... and benefactors, as an attempt, he claimed, to ‘promote virtue and piety’ in his readers. Robert Schofield is well qualified to follow Priestley’s uneven path across the intellectual landscape of 18th-century society. He was trained during and after World War Two as an atomic physicist and engineer, at a moment when once again practical science ...”

“... a man called Warner who lived in Normandy wrote a very dirty Latin poem. Addressed to Archbishop Robert of Rouen, it relates the adventures of an Irish grammarian called Moriuht, who has a series of graphic and often disturbing sexual encounters while searching for his wife, who has been kidnapped. He is captured by Vikings, chained, flogged, urinated ...”

“... contributing in a loud, shrill voice remarks like ‘Mr Henry was a heavy man – nearly 16 stone – it was a job for him to push his bicycle uphill’ – in the middle of all the other conversation wh: he couldn’t hear. Her humour was in that tradition in which her father and her uncle Ronald excelled, and which Punch, at its best, epitomised. In ...”

“... would be affected by the verbal and textual equivalent of the ‘noise and dust and unwanted stone’ that miners are faced with when cutting coal. Despite activists telling their stories, the most influential version of the strike concentrated on high politics, and concerned the legitimacy, legality and efficacy of the NUM’s strategy, as well as the ...”