“... corrosion. Two other towns, Trouville and Barentin, contributed to the project and received stone statues. These have worn less well. At Trouville Flaubert’s upper thigh has had to be patched, and bits of his moustache have fallen off: structural wires poke out like twigs from a concrete stub on his upper lip. Perhaps the foundry’s assurances can be ...”

“... Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a former guild socialist who ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... known from the northern half of the Roman Empire. They were carved as reliefs on slabs of local stone or crude altars or sculpted from the finest marble. They were pressed onto pottery vessels before they were fired, and inscribed with great care on tiny metal amulets. Images of the young god have been found in the windy temple at Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s ...”

“... and of Boulez, strict application of their own theory to their creative work has tended to produce stone-dead music (the former’s Wind Quintet Op. 26, the latter’s two books of Structures for two pianos), while their best pieces invariably entail adjustments of theory. On the other hand, those works which it can be argued really do embody fruitful ...”

“... book was Byt i bytie Mariny Tsvetaevoy; in a note to the English translation Angela Living-stone plausibly explains why this was abandoned in favour of the simple name: could it possibly have been translated as ‘The Living and Being of Marina Tsvetaeva’? Or ‘Marina Tsvetaeva: Her Everyday Existence and Her Higher – or Inner – Being’? Or ...”

“... tomb are just as sartorial. What if Armani and Calvin Klein diversified into the undertaking and stone-dressing business? I could fancy an eternity of decomposition under a layered beige, beautifully cut headstone. But could my cheapskate descendant be trusted not to shop around and dump me in the Monsoon cemetery for dead hippies? Planning the style of ...”

“... the systems of taboos and inhibitions which man has erected to control them’, while for Lawrence Stone history is a geology of the glacial grinding of repression – ‘the huge mysterious secular swings from repression to permissiveness and back again’. In both accounts, it is the body’s chains, not the body itself, which has a history. Edward ...”

“... self-dismemberment?) What she wants now is to become a hybrid of Flip and the land artist Robert Smithson, who made his mark on Utah’s topography with his immense coiling earthwork, Spiral Jetty. As Reno explains to her New York boyfriend, Sandro Valera (an older, successful minimalist artist and heir to the Valera motorcycle and tyre fortune), the ...”

“... Robert Hughes​ has a great enthusiasm for Goya’s art, which he communicates in this biography, together with much useful information, forcefully expressed, about the rival factions at the Bourbon court, the Napoleonic invasion, the evolution of bull-fighting, what a maja was, what guerrillas were. This is mixed with some less useful observations – there were in those days priests who ‘groped boys’ and were ‘quite as bad’ as their modern counterparts – and some errors, as when Hughes claims that the curls of pubic hair in the Naked Maja are certainly the earliest in Western art ...”

“... of prose pieces:I would begin with the Greek word omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it. omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water outside our back door. It is Co. Derry in the early 1940s. The American bombers groan towards the ...”

“... bird cages, glass balls, engraved mirrors, shell pictures, crumbling Italian console tables, stone statues called Castor and Pollux and plaster casts of bits of his own anatomy.’ Then he held parties, with ‘lovely-looking people, charades, impersonations and dressing-up games’. But apart from the theatricals, ‘nothing much happened at ...”

“... plot’ and literary impostor (a category not yet extinct). In the latest volume John Stone-house appears as politician and confidence trickster, but Harold Philby is dubbed Soviet agent rather than traitor and Klaus Fuchs gets by as theoretical physicist. Other less controversial occupations include entrepreneur, man of letters, geologist and ...”

“... yet consigned to the skip two excellent earlier Lives, A.N. Wilson’s Hilaire Belloc (1984) and Robert Speaight’s The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957). If a debunker were needed for this wittily bellicose (‘Bellocose’, Wilson suggests) Catholic author of more than 150 publications (which smacks of thraldom to the work ethic some call the Protestant ...”