“... proposition that the body was nothing more than a complex system of measurable physical processes. Robert Koch’s Institute in Berlin was the epicentre for the bacteriological revolution – one pathogen, one disease and, we hope, one vaccine, one cure – which still dominates medical thinking. And so on. By the end of the 19th century the institutional ...”

“... that it was built by Africans and not some mysterious Semitic visitors.’ Since those stone ruins have an important role in the mythology of Mugabe’s African state, perhaps Selous deserves to have his name commemorated in a black capital for longer than the egregious Ewart Grogan, famous for travelling all the way from the Cape to Cairo in ...”

“... and a thoroughly up-to-date response to the modern world. ‘He and I preferred to the fluxions in stone of an Auguste Rodin (following photographically the lines of nature) the more concentrated abstractions-from-nature of the Egyptians,’ Lewis later recalled. The bad example of Rodin seemed to back their shared belief that ‘the Art-instinct is ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... like a scientific event looking at it in this way, like finding a large fragile fossil embedded in stone, or the mummified remains of a three-thousand-year-old man preserved in a bog, his prunish face flattened and smeared and warped, like a face pressed against a windowpane. I had once seen one of these men stretched out in a museum, and looking at him in his ...”

“... such good use of his work that they were obliged to copy it. Cultures do not disappear like soft stone eroded by tides: they interact with the visitor or invader cultures, as the Indian did with the British, and the Caucasian did with the Russian. Even when the empires which force these cultures on them collapse, the indigenous cultures continue to work on ...”

“... million from the Northern Bank in Belfast on 20 December, and on 30 January the murder of Robert McCartney in Magennis’s Bar. A few months ago it had seemed that the IRA might be on the brink of disbanding. One IRA source was quoted in Ireland’s Sunday Business Post: he said that he had been visited by a member of the IRA leadership, ‘and told ...”

“... of craziness. He stood 6’ 4” tall; for the Johnson fight he weighed in at 105 kilos (over 16 stone) but was heavier when out of condition. In civvies he was insouciant, dandified, caddish-looking: a fur collar, a chapeau melon, his huge shoulders draped in an expensive-looking suit probably bought on credit. Fair-haired and square-jawed, in certain ...”

“... their political, and sentimental, education at the Utøya camp. The ‘left-wing ideological stone in the shoe of the pragmatic governing Labour Party’, Utøya embodied everything that Breivik loathed: feminism, gay rights, and sympathy for immigrants and oppressed Third World peoples. With his ‘pre-emptive’ attack on these ‘cultural ...”

“... and weaknesses. It conveys boundless enthusiasm and great industry in research, but having left no stone unturned Dinshaw is at something of a loss to know what to do with the rubble. The book is not well organised and it is far too long, no detail too trivial to be crammed into one of many footnotes. We do not need to know, for example, that the father of the ...”

“... in Ammons is ‘wind’. An early journal entry contains a note to self – ‘Poetry: to make stone of the phenomena of wind’ – but in the poems such adamantine statements of purpose are haunted by a sense of the frailties of things made. The last poem in A Coast of Trees begins by observing how ‘Wind, though in the temple,/criticises the pillars ...”

“... of Bowie figure for many younger listeners who may never have heard of Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd, Robert Pruitt or Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, before Solange referenced them. There’s a fascinating autodidact’s story there, I think, which is very different from today’s more usual social media dream of effortless, instantaneous global renown. Phillips charts ...”

“... scarcely survive a reading of Professor Jones’s excellent history; it would probably be killed stone dead by even a cursory glance at Russell Taylor’s Going for Broke, which is subtitled ‘How Banking Mismanagement in the Eighties Lost Thousands of Billions of Pounds’. Going for Broke occasionally exasperates because of its lack of organisation ...”

“... asked ‘whether a love of poverty helped’ him ‘use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone’. Whether he’s condemned here for not loving poverty – that is, for not being poor (as, in one account at least, Homer supposedly was) – or for wanting St Lucians to remain poor rather than grow wealthy from the tourists, is not made clear, and the ...”

“... scarce at different times. Thus a loaf of bread in its turn is, as the Gospel says, not like a stone. But at each stage in the process of distinction some sort of contrast of form and matter must be acknowledged. Those who would annexe all for form (or discourse, or ‘text’) are, as it were, constitutionally obliged to ignore the contrast. The drama of ...”