“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... do it; three-year-olds, by conventional tests, cannot. Rhesus monkeys, in the same test done by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, did not. (It seems more and more likely that bottle-nosed dolphins and killer whales are like apes and human four-year-olds, not like three-year olds and monkeys.) Great apes can recognise themselves in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... following the brief Younger Dryas glaciation, had shut down the Gulf Stream for two millennia. Robert Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, scorned the prediction of a sea-level rise of up to 0.59 metres; the figure now looked like a metre at the very least, and he showed a map of what that rise would do to Egypt, the Caspian shores and ...”

“... and medical measures, particularly those prompted by the discovery of the tubercle bacillus by Robert Koch in 1882? Were they all without merit? With pulmonary tuberculosis, there is no doubt that what doctors did to patients before the discovery and development of the main anti-tuberculosis drugs after World War Two – streptomycin, rifampicin and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”