“... for London’s waste. There isn’t much romance in an ordinary boat being rammed, sinking like a stone – with no time for heroism or cowardice or stories of any sort – and leaving survivors bobbing for a few minutes in shit. The Titanic and her sister ships, on the other hand, were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster ...”

“... Duse ‘almost concealed’ it: ‘She takes her great anguish and lays it in a tomb and rolls a stone before the door.’ Cather gravitated towards Duse, Acocella suggests, because the Italian actress’s understated style came closest to expressing Cather’s own evolving impulse as a novelist: to convey meaning subtly, through oblique hints and ...”

“... could shift the frontier of oil exhaustion decisively. Sheikh Yamani is fond of saying that ‘the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone’: the Oil Age will come to an end long before the world runs out of oil. It is untenable, then, to suggest that absolute scarcity propelled the events of 2003. Price didn’t have much ...”

“... up as Bimbo (as in the clown by Walt Disney). However, let him who is without typos cast the first stone. Even the honourable and impeccable Samuels perpetrated the occasional stinker, and lest the above be taken for a pasting, let it be said that Meryle Secrest has written an entertaining, readable, often very perceptive biography which by no stretch of the ...”

“... evidence linking him to war crimes. Despite the advanced state of the German prosecution, Richard Goldstone, who had recently been given leave from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to head the Prosecutor’s office in The Hague, was determined that the Tribunal should not let the only current case of an alleged war criminal pass ...”

“... The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not ...”

“... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite ...”

“... Monroe. Like so many young London literati of the period – Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Hulme and Richard Aldington and F.S. Flint – Eliot fell under the spell of Pound’s beguiling mixture of flamboyance, generosity and startling self-confidence. Together they orchestrated what in hindsight can seem like a hostile takeover of the somewhat moribund London ...”

“... by such as Julian Huxley and Joseph Needham. They had not lasted. The writer just quoted is Richard Hoggart, whose memories of his time in Paris are not fond. The picture he paints of a Unesco General Conference – the kind taking place through the door just to the left of Picasso’s mural – seems relevant. Meetings usually start late. There is no ...”

“... wrote of ‘blind Orion hungry for the morn’ in Endymion, while Turner’s near contemporary Richard Horne wrote an epic poem, Orion, the year before Turner exhibited Rain, Steam and Speed. Charles Lamb’s version of the Odyssey appeared in 1808: ‘Then came by a thundering ghost, the large-limbed Orion, the mighty hunter, who was hunting there the ...”

“... wife, Rebekah. He dreams repeatedly of ‘a night-time City, – of creeping among monuments of stone perhaps twice his height, of seeking refuge from some absolute pitiless Upheaval in relations among Men’. He’s a decent chap, but regretful and prone to resentment. As a team, M&D are a bit like Eric and Ernie, as comic, as equally matched and with a ...”

“... actually – which were called Freeman, Hardy and Willis – were trained by Barry’s brother, Richard, who showed David how to work with the birds himself. Everything had the appropriate size about it.’ Loach’s sense of ‘appropriate size’ remains to this day the key to his achievement as a filmmaker.Kes marked a conscious departure from the ...”

“... ex-prisoners, inhabit that section of Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’ which uses the image of a stone in a stream (‘Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream’), and if they are the men in whom ‘too long a sacrifice can make a ...”

“... After the putsch collapsed, Gorbachev doggedly resumed his search for the philosopher’s stone which would turn a disintegrating empire into a functioning union. The coda of his political life was his effort to bring the republican leaders to sign something which could paste over the widening cracks between them. In this he was assisted by Grigory ...”

“... of Evesham, who were not displeased to acquire an apparently inexhaustible supply of good building stone. The 35 monks put down from their seats in the abbey choir were assured of a pension from the bureaucracy set up by Henry VIII and his details man and fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Abbot Hawford’s career was not over; he died seventeen years later as dean of ...”