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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a performance of ‘Go’, a dance record – a techno dance record – and solo composition by Richard ‘Moby’ Hall, created on his computer at home in New York. During its almost lyric-less six minutes and 30 seconds of fast beats, atonal bleeps and melodic keyboard lines, you hear ‘go’ shouted 37 times, ‘yeah’ 23 times, and ‘hold tight’ (I ...”

“... of Lords ruling under the Criminal Justice Act. Overturning the convictions of Margaret Jones and Richard Lloyd, the Stonehenge Two, for ‘trespassory assembly’ at the site, Lord Irvine described the right of access as ‘an issue of fundamental constitutional importance’. The exclusion zone became illegal and on its website English Heritage now ...”

“... with the ousted Rebekah Brooks. News Corp shares in free-fall. One would need a heart of stone not to gloat. Murdoch’s initial response to the crisis in closing the News of the World was acclaimed by several commentators as ‘brilliant’ but ‘ruthless’. That verdict seems at most half-correct. In fact, by folding NotW so early in the ...”

“... being British but took on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ...”