“... tribe. Imelda Marcos visited and declared herself a changed person; so did Gina Lollobrigida and Charles Lindbergh. National Geographic came and went twice. Everyone who visited the Tasaday was ravished by the remote setting and touched by the group’s affectionate spontaneity. For their part the Tasaday became deeply attached to John Nance and positively ...”

“... man of destiny escaped from Ham wearing a labourer’s smock and hiding his face behind a plank of wood. He fled to London, where he signed up as a special constable and helped to control Chartist demonstrators. After the 1848 Revolution, he returned to France, determined to take charge of the new Republic – ‘dreaming, as usual’, according to his cousin ...”

“... to be chipped away from the ice in the boat. They tried to make a fire, but had no hatchet to cut wood. The party lay exposed to the cold all night. Everyone except the girl and one frostbitten man died. Their Indian rescuers hacked graves from the solid earth. We now know that it really was much colder back then. The early modern ...”

“... of the master mason John Wastell sits in harmony with later Flemish stained glass and French wood carving, embellished with classical motifs. It is Gothic going on Renaissance. Instead, cut off from Continental influence, after the initial hiatus, the story of architecture in Britain and Ireland over the next three centuries took a different direction ...”

“... they favoured market-proven painting and sculpture over more experimental and critical forms. Charles Saatchi, an early backer of Hirst, was alert not only to the new investment potential of contemporary art but also to the publicity value of its more notorious players. The art market fell dramatically in 1990, three years after the stock market crash of ...”

“... interactions seemed slower, gentler, somehow permanent, as did their aesthetic of marble, heavy wood, stone, tiles and gold-painted cursive signs – none of the plastic and plaster beloved of today’s builders. During the Gezi protests, I noticed a teenager rubbing with his foot the meringue façade of a mall which covered what once had been a perfectly ...”

“... her wheel,/And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven.’ Fellies are the curved sections of wood which make up the rim of a wheel (Old English felg), while the nave (cognate with Sanskrit nābhi or ‘navel’) is the central section into which the spokes and axle fit from different axes. This kind of technolalia turns me on. Using a word like ...”

“... the massacre was so great that the blood of the slain flowed in a river like the Nile, red as the wood used in dyeing.’ A second assault by Tamerlane in 1401 was even more devastating. While the Tartar hero, famed for his piety, prayed at the shrine of Abu Hanifa, founder of one of the four Sunni law schools, his soldiers put the finishing touches to the ...”

“... to have vanished.A major source for Stourton is Clark’s letters to Janet Stone, wife of the wood engraver Lawrence Stone, kept under embargo in the Bodleian but available to Stourton in the form of transcripts made before they were consigned to the library. Clark’s true feelings are more likely to be found here than anywhere else. Stourton admits to a ...”

“... Essex. 7. 1828, month unknown. Shot at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, Yorkshire, by the keeper of Lord Charles Stourton. 8. 1840, month unknown. Caught in a state of exhaustion near Marshchapel in North Lincolnshire. 9. 1841, 21 December. Shot at Margate, Kent, by a boy ‘employed in keeping crows’; sold to a dealer for fourpence, then exhibited in Margate ...”

“... by ‘left-behind’ voters in the North and the Midlands. The largely white and deprived Burnley Wood ward never returned a BNP councillor, sticking firmly to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The first Burnley ward to fall to the BNP was picture-postcard Cliviger, in the Pennine foothills. For a while the party represented the Brontë village of Haworth on ...”

“... Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it seems; the second was a plaything, although also a try-out for the big architecture of the next generation; the third is ...”

“... of her friend and also of the period, now just slipping from memory into history. A card with Charles and Diana on the front – under the caption ‘All I want for Christmas is …’ she says, ‘A divorce’; he answers, ‘I wasn’t thinking of anything that expensive’ – was sent in 1987, five years before John Major announced the ‘amicable ...”

“... and there’s certainly something universal about remembering. ‘That Alice Munro, now 81,’ Charles McGrath, her first editor at the New Yorker, wrote recently in the New York Times, ‘is one of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time ought to go without saying by now.’ ‘Alice Munro,’ James ...”

“... most celebrated headmasters suddenly, and for no obvious reason, resigned his job. The Rev. Charles Vaughan had taken charge at Harrow in 1845, when the school was close to collapse. There were just 69 boys on the roll (many of whom were seriously in debt to the local loan shark); even by Victorian standards the boys’ lodgings were a health ...”