“... Because there’s a tampon in there that going forward I will hesitate to use.We walk down winding stone stairs. I am conversing with an Australian conductor, the first woman to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic. ‘So you’re Tár,’ I say thoughtfully. No, she actually is Tár. Suddenly we are in a dome that feels like a human head, full of flesh, climbing ...”

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... your come-uppance without being wholly evil. In Shame, which stars the country’s heart-throb, Richard Mofe-Damijo, and ‘the ageless’ (and Hollywood-bound) Liz Benson, it is enough to falter. Daniel and Rena are a happily married couple with three children whose life changes when Daniel loses his job. He is wrongly accused of theft and tortured by the ...”

“... by rumours that the Chinese were planning to kidnap the Dalai Lama, provided the perfect excuse. Stone-throwing and shouting in the streets of Lhasa quickly metastasised into a serious insurgency. Mao was delighted; ‘the Tibetan problems are very likely to be resolved by force,’ he advised the military command in Lhasa: ‘this kind of force is ...”

“... pink, the sea is silver; clouds look like a mirror. One image is called ‘Sunset like hair’. A stone reads ‘I do plead not guilty.’ Indoors, the electric lights look like the aurora borealis. A fire blazes next to a TV screen. The images are blurred, marked with light leaks and burns on celluloid. ‘That slideshow’s based on outtakes,’ Goldin told ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”