“... soon got out of hand. One boy made a gun from an old candlestick, loaded it with gunpowder and stone, and managed to kill a calf; ‘the owner complayned, the master whipped, and the division ended.’Under the old religion, children had been treated as helpmeets rather than believers, deployed at altars or in choirs, marshalled to act out spectacles. On ...”

“... and unproblematic, even something of an anticlimax’. Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Robert Cecil, had without her knowledge masterminded a succession plan, starting a clandestine correspondence with James two years before her death. Accordingly, James had been shown the proclamation announcing his accession that was read aloud at Richmond Palace ...”

“... in six years’ exile in the States was not on Broadway or in Hollywood, but the cigar-smoking stone-walling in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington; and in one of the last things he wrote, days before his death (in 1956), a note to his Berliner Ensemble on their forthcoming visit to London, he was unillusioned, even prophetic ...”

“... ne li atti questa bella petra’ (‘In my speech I want to be rough/as this beautiful stone [-hearted woman] is in her deeds’) – can be heard behind Montale’s great opening from the Mediterraneo sequence: ‘Avrei voluto sentirmi scabro ed essenziale/siccome i ciottoli che tu volvi’ (‘I would have liked to feel harsh and essential/like ...”

“... ineffectiveness was partly caused by ineffective leaders. Where was the Labor equivalent of Sir Robert Menzies – a man of great physical presence and even greater political cunning? The answer, when it finally came, was Gough Whitlam. He was a man of commanding height, a middle-class barrister like Menzies, a skilled debater, supremely self-confident, a ...”

“... as her subtitle has it. Since historians can find no trace of the real Helen on a coin, a stone or in a factual document, the search for her leads only to dreams and fantasies. Bettany Hughes attempted an archaeological quest in her Helen of Troy (2005), but was left wistfully hoping that Helen’s tomb might be discovered one day. Maguire finds ...”

“... a demand for massive reparation payments to black Americans. The Monroe Ride was hosted by Robert Franklin Williams. Nicknamed ‘Chairman Rob’ by his supporters, Williams was second only to the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X as an outspoken advocate of ‘armed self-reliance’. The head of the Monroe branch of the NAACP in the 1950s, he assembled ...”

“... On a green hill​ above a lake in my local park in Leeds, there is a handsome stone structure. The Barrans Fountain was built by the Victorian clothing manufacturer Sir John Barran, once also the city’s mayor. He must have been a man with ambition. A building he constructed in the city centre is Moorish and beautiful, a small glimpse of Granada in the middle of West Yorkshire, though it was nothing more grand than a warehouse ...”

“... trikila, or in standard form drengiliga, ‘in manly fashion, like warriors’. The Gripsholm stone is one of 26 commemorating what seems to have been a failed expedition to the east led by Ingvar the Far-Travelled. By contrast, a rather self-satisfied stone from Yttergärde in Sweden memorialises a man called Ulf, who ...”

“... resemblance to clothes worn by ordinary women. They seem constructed rather than sewn, durable as stone with their elaborate frosting and beading, and capable of standing up on their own. But their owners worry about their survival. One appears on display only under armed guard. When a Boston shop-owner bought three of them and put them in her ...”

“... and shot by a firing squad, two at a time. There were five British victims: four Gibraltarians and Robert Boyd, a young Irish officer of the Bengal Army who’d put up most of the cash, hoping for a glamorous alternative to service in India as a grandee in Torrijos’s Spain. He was better treated, though, than Lorca would be. The Spanish government allowed ...”

“... spaces were not stamped with MoMA approval until now: neither established ones like Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson or rediscovered ones like Yayoi Kusama and Lee Bontecou; and others were rarely seen at all, such as Romare Bearden, Richard Hamilton and R.B. Kitaj in the Pop gallery, and Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica in the Minimalist and ...”

“... two new English translations, one by Robin Kirkpatrick, the other by the husband and wife team of Robert and Jean Hollander, should be welcomed. Each edition is the final volume of a long labour, and each helps the reader see this last cantica in the context of the previous two. With Virgil as his guide, Dante has already spiralled down through hell, seen ...”

“... with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but ...”

“... through those they admire, and the heroes whom Chatwin celebrates here, apart from Rock, include Robert Byron and Ernst Jünger. With Byron he shared a boyish romanticism sophisticated by intellect, a sense of the bizarre, and the gift of descriptive exactitude. In the chapter on Ernst Jünger’s Diaries (which he subtitles ‘An Aesthete at War’), he ...”