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“... 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 ...”

“... Prague’s history. The first time Hero picks it up, she reads about a second-hand bookshop whose stone walls expel scraps of 16th-century parchment, bits of letters exchanged within a love triangle at the court of Rudolf II. On Thea’s second read, the book tells the story of a woman known as ‘the Uglifier’ who surreptitiously cuts the hair of ...”

“... one case,’ he said, ‘whether it’s here’ – he meant Garvaghy Road – ‘or the murder of Robert Hamill, or whatever. I think it was the cumulative effect of all the cases. I think it was the fact that she had taken a number of cases very successfully against the RUC. We said away last year that Rosemary needed protection and she was never given ...”

“... her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1974 Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is ...”

“... things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s ...”