“... the beggar does not speak. Wordlessly, he snatches the cake basket and throws it ‘at the nearest stone’. Then he ‘tramps on through the grey rainy day’. Marili is so stunned that she develops a fever. By the time she resurfaces from her delirium, her childhood has become irrecoverable. Outside, it is snowing. ‘Tomorrow it would snow ...”

“... of a man regarded as one of the most unreal, isolated and timeless figures of the Victorian era. Richard Burton arrived in the Adriatic port in 1873 as Britain’s consul. He had pretty much seen everything. He had visited sacred centres from Benares to Salt Lake City, with a pilgrimage to Mecca in between; he had trekked thousands of miles into central ...”

“... The​ retrospective of Richard Estes’s work (until 8 February) is dazzling in more than one sense. From the late 1960s, when he established his mature style, his paintings of New York make use of hard, reflective surfaces like plate-glass shop windows, car bonnets, fenders and windscreens to fragment, distort and multiply images, replicating something of the visual complexity, speed and energy of the city streets ...”

“... for the requisite extractions) on her 21st birthday, or the occasion of her first marriage. As Richard Barnett points out in his excellent text for The Smile Stealers, it wasn’t uncommon up until the late 1930s for young women to receive just such a benison – the reification, if you like, of the great relief to be obtained once those nerve-infested ...”

“... by modern society. The one way round indissolubility was flight. The cases recorded by Lawrence Stone in his magisterial Family, Sex and Marriage suggest that flight was often seen by the abandoned partner as giving them the right to remarry. But in spite of the mobility of English rural society from the Middle Ages on, life was not easy for the fugitive ...”

“... cloisters. The memorial carries the simple legend WAVELL, deeply etched into the surface of a stone buried horizontally in the grass, and it joins those of other Wykehamists who are remembered there: George Mallory, lost on Everest in 1924, and William Whiting, who wrote the hymn ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’. Archibald Wavell, one of the ...”

“... countries, defiantly announced that mothers have not always loved their offspring. Lawrence Stone, whose book Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) prints some horrifying passages about maternal indifference and neglect. When he lectured on this subject in Cambridge in 1975, Stone painted a dismal ...”

“... his protest that, unlike the compassionate cat, the dog did not ‘shedde one teare: he is a stone, a very pibble stone, and has no more pitty in him then a dog.’ The circularity is instructive. The clown is thinking through things more than philosophically difficult. The animal gains our and the fool’s feeling by ...”

“... Wace, is famous for his visit to the enchanted Breton forest of Brocéliande to find out about the stone of Barenton, which made it rain when water was splashed on it. Wace was not impressed, commenting sourly, Fol i alai, fol m’en rivinc: ‘I went like a fool and I came back a fool.’ But the rain-making stone was used ...”

“... one of lusty enterprise, the other of enterprising lust, set against the backdrop world of the stone-strewn, sheep-habited headland, the moody sea, the beckoning offshore island, the token tenantry of rustic characters, enigmatic, pragmatic, dogmatic, deeply enduring. Readers may detect an odour of Lawrence here and there, or catch a whiff of Cold Comfort ...”

“... wasn’t the only black artist of his generation who felt liberated by Paris. Baldwin noted that Richard Wright considered it a ‘city of refuge’. Even Baldwin, who developed a much more jaundiced view of France, admitted that he could never bring himself to hate the French, because they had left him alone. As Paris Noir underscores, the city served as ...”

“... of Meleager, Endymion, the Niobids and the rest that Romans had chosen for the sides of their stone coffins. I was in Rome at the time, and the coffins were everywhere. So I found myself standing on the stairs of the Palazzo Mattei, trying to imagine the sensibility behind the solid collision of Mars and Rhea Silvia, and leafing endlessly through the four ...”

“... poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for regicide, doing in the book? Why do we tour the agonised mind of the ...”

“... Einstein. Heine, who poured scorn on the monument, was added in 2010; the sculptor split the stone from Heine’s cheek to his chest to indicate his probable reluctance to be included. Marx still hasn’t been let in; anyone who wanted to see him would have had to go to the Valhalla of the Present installed by the conceptual artist H.A. Schult in the ...”

“... with chivalry as Don Quixote but who wielded a pen rather than a lance. Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour: Rules for the Gentlemen of England (1822-23, enlarged to five volumes by 1877) was an eccentric textbook of modernised chivalry as influential in its own time, particularly in public-school circles, as it is forgotten now. Reluctance to ...”