“... cooks, cleaners, sailors and security operatives.Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe. I had the notion that somewhere behind and beyond the sharp-eyed sociological expeditions she undertakes was a General Theory of Everything. A resolution of that terrible inundation coming from all sides at once: our ultimate ...”

“... At the end of a path lined with cypress trees a rectangle of clipped lawn is enclosed by low grey stone walls. Some 356 British soldiers and airmen of the First World War are buried here, the graves set in rows, softened by evergreen shrubs, floribunda roses and photinia trees. The headstones are engraved with regimental badges, names, ranks and dates. The ...”

“... become so totally “unhinged” when it comes to your favourite President, me. These people are stone cold crazy!’ It is unclear what exactly prompted this. He also tweets his new campaign slogan, ‘Transition to Greatness’, which presumably does not refer to the transgender community.California announces that it will send mail-in ballots to all voters ...”

“... and stars Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother who begins to fall apart after she and her partner (Robert Pattinson) move from New York to rural Montana. The photography is close and jittery and the sound claustrophobic. It has been described as a film ‘about’ postpartum depression, but it is far from being an issue film in the way that might suggest ...”

“... endowed them. Before long Gay’s scrupulous historical habits began to spread, and by 1979, when Robert Darnton investigated the relationship between the Encyclopédie and the book trade in The Business of Enlightenment, it was clear that the study of 18th-century thought was changing out of recognition. From now on it would belong to professional historians ...”

“... of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and, Tennyson told Moxon, before its sensationalist precursor, Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, came out in 1844. Holmes is sceptical about this, thinking that Tennyson must have been reacting to Chambers’s observation that, within evolution, ‘the Individual … is to the Author of ...”

“... never dreamedthat islands sixty miles apart, made of the            same stone, of nearly equal height in the same climate, could have different tenants.’ Fast forward             twenty yearsand you see him write of this scatter-burst of            rock in open sea, ‘We seem ...”

“... these beginnings, an extraordinary financial and quasi-political realm was built. Its architect, Robert Hart, was just 28 when he became Inspector-General in 1863. Rapidly winning the confidence of the Chi’ng court, he went on to create the first modern administrative system in China. Its core was a fiscal bureaucracy that assured the late imperial state ...”

“... who sat bolt upright in her bed, oblivious to the surrounding tumult, as silent and unmoving as a stone deity. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of Suddenly Last Summer. Mam was not ill like this. She had nothing to do with the distracted creature who sat by the nearest bed, her gown hitched ...”

“... Passage’, he wrote:I always become, sooner or later,The thing I feel kinship with, be it a stone or a yearning,A flower or an abstract idea,A multitude or a way of understanding God.And in ‘I Leaned Back in the Deck Chair and Closed My Eyes’:Ah, all of me yearnsFor that moment of no importanceIn my life.All of me yearns for that as for other ...”

“... in the same year, his body man Reggie Love points out an image of a man’s face carved in the stone: ‘Not the profile typical of hieroglyphics but a straight-on head shot. A long, oval face. Prominent ears sticking out like handles. A cartoon of me, somehow forged in antiquity.’ They have a good laugh about it, but Obama is not smiling on the ...”

“... precede Chamberlain, and the seat of civic power, the Council House, for which he laid the first stone, is remarkable only so long as you don’t compare it with the mighty municipal edifices of Leeds, Bolton, Rochdale or Manchester.Chamberlain’s other legacy is Corporation Street, planned with great fanfare and funded with the proceeds of the gas and ...”

“... gimcrack show will fall to the ground, and then we shall consider how to build up an edifice of stone. For the first time! We are going to build it, we, and only we!’ ‘Madness,’ answers Stavrogin. A few minutes later, Verkhovensky, pretty much back to normal, is offering to have Stavrogin’s wife murdered free of charge. This comes as a relief. It ...”

“... made of more subtle kinds of matter than ours, but adds that a creature who can pass through a stone wall is bound to be called a spirit, and it is no use quarrelling with common language. However, all creatures with material bodies will eventually die, so if we find them around they must be capable of breeding, though not often as they are long ...”

“... mind has blundered: ‘nadir to nadir’, riches to rags; in the temple of order decapitated stone figures struck from niches; mobbed cattle with their drool and ordure; at their hooves dogs. So what do you make of that? Salamis was the famous naval battle at which the Greeks defeated the Persians; but that won’t help with the phrase ‘Irish ...”