“... been in place since 1970. Only in a small corner of today’s Damascus, demarcated by the broad stone walls of the Old City, are ancient houses being restored and gentrified after generations of neglect. Syrians who for years avoided the dilapidated bazaars are revisiting the charm of mud and wood, stone and ...”

“... living entity – that’s the given we have to acknowledge. We are part of every fossil-encrusted stone, every bloodied feather. As we walk, the city absorbs us, changes us, and allows us, if we are fortunate, to make our own small contribution. The city, before the Great Fire, was a dense forest of church steeples, a ...”

“... but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester ...”

“... writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North American diaries he has little to say about the ‘Negro Question’, other than that a Martinican employee of the French embassy, forced to rent in Harlem, had only just ...”

“... cross in workshops, but we were in a literature class together, where the visiting professor, Richard Ellmann, had us read our own writing. I had a profound fear of public speaking, but when it was my turn, looking out over the classroom, I saw David and Heather’s faces smiling in encouragement. David in particular seemed like my own personal ...”

“... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...”

“... In another poem I previously hadn’t noticed (‘A Missive Missile’) he looks at a small stone decorated by a prehistoric artist, and realises that he cannot tell whether its three red signs – ‘two round dots and a ripple streak’ – should be read as eyes and a mouth or as drops of blood and a dagger. He reflects, rewriting Shakespeare’s ...”

“... illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of non-violence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the ...”

“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him’.In 1934, a year before his death, Pessoa began a ...”

“... then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one ...”

“... recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were treated to mayoral banquets, only for their leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to ...”

“... No Wit depends. For Shakespeare, the theatre could stand for deceit or shallow imposture, as in Richard III’s antics or Antony’s ‘excellent dissembling’; but it was just as likely to suggest the possibility of more profound psychological transformations, as in the elusiveness of Bottom’s dream or Cleopatra’s mysterious ‘becomings’. Not so in ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... it, the English dotards and their epigones would, amazingly, still be at it, all red brick and stone quoins, in the years after the second war. ‘Retardataire’ was a word Pevsner relished.Reilly’s galère left out a number of artists of whose existence he may have been unaware, just as they may have been unaware of each other. Patrick Abercrombie ...”