“... books, including (chosen because I read them too): The Wind in the Willows, The Sword in the Stone, Through the Looking-Glass, Burglar Bill, Alfie Gets in First, Where the Wild Things Are. Piaget’s theories of childhood development are introduced, as are some of the problems with them. We learn that ‘by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 it would ...”

“... that they’d . . . construct some decent facsimile of life below in the grass, brick and grey stone, perceive the human grain making up the fabric of the view. Otherwise what could the eye see as it looked down on a strange land from so high, except history instead of yesterday, prophecy instead of tomorrow, and a today that was either a view, or a ...”

“... to the margins’. There, pockets of Whig resistance no doubt remain – readers of Lawrence Stone’s correspondence with Russell in the TLS not so long ago might be surprised to learn the field had become so pacific. Yet even Stone has conceded the second part of the victory the revisionists claim. For he, too, has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the future is currently so uncertain, that for present generations the situation can feel set in stone. The world in fifty years’ time is almost impossible to imagine. Telling a teenager not to be too grabby for the assets of the old because he or she will one day be old too seems like thin gruel in the current climate.Ageism can still be a problem, as ...”

“... 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 ...”