“... material. But it’s also possible to stick a bit more on. The gold collar worn by a 16th-century rock-crystal bird is there to keep its head on. If a single trunk did not serve, German limewood sculptors added a bit here and another bit there; even in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the integrity of the marble block (which, unlike limewood, was not ...”

“... the Cairngorms, where the moors are a shallow quilt of peat and heather clinging onto the colossal rock-forms of the mountains. The beauty of The Moor is that it sees our shaggy and stony uplands as wholly entangled in human life, not as weird lunar nowherelands. In 1681 Charles Cotton dismissed them as ‘Nature’s pudenda’; in 1775 Dr Johnson was ...”

“... of the egg is in contact with that; the other side of the egg lies directly on the ice or the rock ledge – not even on the bird’s feet as in some other species.’ Such a passage is typical of The Most Perfect Thing both in its candour and in its closeness to fact. As is so often the case, this doesn’t deflate some sacred mystery, but enriches our ...”

“... a musical staff. Then there is the curse of arid musicology; and of Rolling Stone-ism, the gonzo rock journalist who thinks he is a rock star. Perhaps worst of all, there is the curse of the rhetoric of social action and ‘revolution’, a faith-based illusion that pop songs clearly manifest social history, or an ...”

“... and prestige, rather than new loves or old, the character of The Leopard’s originator emerges in David Gilmour’s entertaining and astute biography. There is at times, but only at times, an excess of reserve – caught from his subject’s own fastidiousness? In the brief, lyrical memoir Lampedusa wrote in 1955, he invoked with unequivocal passion the ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... able to remember what had gone on. By this time – 2010 – he was in the running to buy Northern Rock and didn’t want the publicity of another court case. The prosecution decided he couldn’t be relied on as a witness. Then Virgin Atlantic discovered a tranche of previously unseen emails that appeared to contradict the prosecution’s case, and the trial ...”

“... opening pages of Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams examines the earliest records of symbolic behaviour. It is unlikely we will ever pinpoint just when the human habit of investing objects with significance took hold. But for the moment, until fresh discoveries arrive, the most striking ...”

“... partying in a house. And then other houses. It’s all samba and bossa nova and the memories of rock stars. The memoir the movie is based on, which has the same title, carries an epigraph from David Bowie: ‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.’Well, perhaps this is not so comforting. A title card has ...”

“... it revealed at the time seem easier to grasp in retrospect. They’re still interesting: rock and roll fundamentalism v. avant-gardism; therapy v. politics; and, above all for Lennon, John v. the Beatles and all they stood for. It’s also clear that this clever man profited from his relationship with Yoko Ono, who served his purposes in serving her ...”

“... On his way to the shore, the patriarch mounted a rock, a flat-topped outcrop of Greenland granite. The people of Ilulissat, who had been standing silently along the skyline above us, made their way down and gathered round him until the flat summit was packed and children clung to their parents’ legs to avoid being pushed down the rock’s sheer sides ...”

“... or holding something ‘under erasure’: ‘When we say that the lizard is stretched out on the rock, we should cross through [durchstreichen] the word “rock”, to indicate that while what the lizard is stretched out on is doubtless given him in some way, it is not known [or recognised] as ...”

“... child growing up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side a few years before the First World War. David Schearl, the protagonist, lives in terror of his father, an implacably resentful man called Albert, who boils with rage every evening while recounting real or imagined workplace slights: ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How much can ...”

“... there, a reluctance to scan the waves. But twenty miles due east down the firth stands the Bass Rock, the biggest gannetry on earth. The Bass is the plug of an ancient volcano. Nowadays, 150,000 gannets nest on its rocky flanks, and all over its plateau. So many gannets that the island gleams white with wings and guano. But today, even from this distance ...”

“... Eliza Fenwick’s excruciating pseudo-Gothic epistolary novel, Secresy; or, The Ruin of the Rock (1795), is hardly the first ‘lost’ 18th-century woman’s novel to be resurrected over the past decade by feminist literary historians. Other recent finds include Eliza Haywood’s snooze-inducing The British Recluse from 1722 (‘a sad Example of what ...”