“... when the focus on the hinterlands of Dundee seems too archaically soft. Air-psalters and pages of stone Inscribed and Caledonian Under these leaf-libraries where Melodious lost literature Remembers itself! There’s a whiff here of the loftily musing Poet; there’s something a little stagey about that exclamation-mark, but such worries vanish with I do not ...”

“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... and ‘in depth’ material from the usual places, using Drudge’s website as a stepping stone. He claims six million hits a month and as many as a million a day when a really hot and edgy story (like ‘Monica II’) is fresh. He has monitored up to three thousand hits in one day from the White House – which has a staff of a thousand. Despite the ...”

“... Hill and its contents in the 1820s). This concerns the alleged sexual tastes of Archbishop Stone of Armagh and of Lord George Sackville, the future martyr of Minden, then chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Walpole admits it to be ‘mere matter of suspicion’, but does not hold back on the innuendo: The Irish are not farther removed ...”

“... he has written a novel called The Memorial; lives with his mother and a younger brother called Richard; works on a movie; has fashionable but uncontroversial left-wing ideas (he speaks himself of his ‘parlour socialism’); confesses to small acts of cowardice. But we know far more about the quality of his attention to the world than we know about ...”

“... a new narrative about the ancient world, one built from the modest lives and careers recorded on stone.Indexes continued​ to suffer disrespect, however. Great scholars took pride in not having taken short cuts to learning. Scaliger himself described in revealing terms the way he had mastered the languages of antiquity: ‘Beginning with a mere smattering ...”

“... another children’s series about a secret pagan society embedded within an isolated village; The Stone Tape (1972), a Nigel Kneale-scripted story about a building whose very fabric retains sinister memories; and Penda’s Fen (1974), a collaboration between David Rudkin and the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of ...”

“... value. When England’s bid to host this summer’s tournament crashed and burned back in 2010, Richard Scudamore, executive chairman of the Premier League, responded by pointing out that for almost the whole world English football meant the Premier League, which would continue to thrive regardless. He was simultaneously saying the unsayable and stating the ...”

“... the same year, more famously, his (female) cousin Bichonnade in mid-leap over a flight of stone steps. Decades later, and self-referentially, Lartigue persuaded Richard Avedon to launch himself upwards, camera in hand, with a curling whip of flash cable snaking about in the air.The world he took part in and ...”

“... he had. ‘Count on the memory of history,’ he told the unfortunate English negotiator William Richard Hamilton, ‘you too will have burned a library in Alexandria.’ In the end, the savants left with 55 cases of specimens and scientific papers. But the British got most of the artefacts, including the Rosetta ...”

“... have known but one really dull Bohemian, and I have known a great many clever ones. You know Richard Wagner said that whenever he got dull he went to Prague. “There I renew my youth,” he wrote, “in that magical and volcanic soil of Bohemia.”’ She dramatised the South-West breakthrough in her 1915 novel, Song of the Lark, a book that shed light ...”

“... to believe that she was eight years older than Shakespeare is that a brass plate, set in the stone over her grave, records that Ann ‘departed this life on the sixth day of August 1623 being of the age of 67 years’. If it turns out that the engraver was misinformed about her age or that his hand slipped and changed a 1 into a 7, the racy story of an ...”

“... Maillart or Frei Otto. For them, construction – the business of embodying a design in brick, stone, steel – takes on its proper importance. In the heroic age of English engineering, engineer-contractors like the Stephensons dominate. Professional institutions have encouraged their members to keep the commercial side of building at a ...”

“... at least a fantasy of self-transformation. An accountant who spends his weekends laying York stone in the garden of his ruined manor in Somerset is imagining himself moving in two social directions at once: he enjoys pretending to be a manual worker; and he likes the idea that after his labour his estate will seem a bit more like that of a ...”

“... to deal with a plague of poems modelled on that work, so that the mere occurrence of the words ‘stone’, ‘dust’ or ‘dry’ condemned them to the waste basket. Even among knowing readers the standing of Eliot as a poet was diminishing; the early novelty was gone. Ash Wednesday was too religious for many of them. Discussions of Eliot’s prose still ...”