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“... itinerary further truncated by illness; for Voices of the Old Sea, perhaps his best travel-book, Norman Lewis hung out in a small Portuguese fishing village. Theroux’s mileage always clocks up a high four figures. And while desultory, capricious travel tends to reveal its elusive agenda only belatedly – Greene’s acknowledgment, in the grip of fever, of ...”

“... The show opens in 12th-century London, where Becket was born in 1120, or thereabouts, to a Norman mercantile family of rising prosperity. Some pottery, coins and a pair of bone ice skates, supplemented by a manuscript illustration of boys skating and sledging, represent the environment in which the young Becket grew up, but we’re given little sense ...”

“... habitable and amiable piece of country. Prehistoric settler, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Dane and Norman all found acceptable homes within it. The legacies they have bequeathed to the landscape occupy the preliminary chapters of a text that gets into its stride with a review of the great medieval residences and the lofty perpendicular churches in which the ...”

“... village perched on a ridge above the Evenlode valley looking across to Stonesfield (where the stone slates are quarried) and the back of Blenheim Park. Here Rowse began collecting notes for a poem so I pointed out a great rosemary bush in flower to him and told him it was marjoram. I look forward to the published error. At North Leigh we saw Mr Hevesi ...”

“... Not​ many people have heard of Norman Borlaug, but his invention – the high-yield, short-straw wheat that fuelled the Green Revolution – is consumed every day by the majority of humans on the planet. Without Borlaug’s wheat, there would be no modern food as we know it. Everything from sandwiches to pizza to soy sauce to animal feed is manufactured from wheats adapted from Borlaug’s ...”

“... courtly love songs corresponding to the troubadour canon, they would have been composed in Anglo-Norman – the official court language from the Conquest to the mid-14th century. But by the time English had rediscovered its poetic aspirations, the era of the grand chant courtois had long passed, and the Middle English lyric savours less of the court than of ...”

“... side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however infallible, will only go so far; while on the other, the lights of the New Criterion or Public Interest shine brighter in the reputable British mirror than they do more nakedly at home. The result is a formula that makes for a livelier ...”

“... give a multiple-perspective view of the exhibition. In his own Introduction, the show’s curator, Norman Rosenthal, who is the Royal Academy’s ‘secretary’ in charge of exhibitions, places Sensation in a very broad art historical context, making ambitious claims for the importance of the work and explaining his choice of title. Next, Richard Shone, an ...”

“... strong unassertive style adapted well. It was cool enough for Philip Webb, but it could be robust. Norman Shaw used the tiles in the ‘Old English’ interior of the Tabard Inn at Bedford Park, the artistic suburb, built from the late 1870s, where the inhabitants ‘read Rossetti by Japanesey lamps’. De Morgan still looked modern when the next generation of ...”

“... seem more likely to recover. People often confuse schizophrenia with the split personality that Norman Bates had in Psycho. He was both Norman and his mother. Norman had dissociative identity disorder. I’ve written to the LRB about this confusion but my letter wasn’t published. I ...”

“... or the Virgin Mary. Ted Hughes wrote a poem for the same place on the same occasion, incised in stone, in the square with Larkin’s. The poem does not feature in this handsome slim collection, at least I don’t think it does, for Hughes was not the Laureate at the time, and these are his Laureate verses. But as it happens, the little commencement epigraph ...”

“... and irrelevant’. Over the years, a lot of these effete and irrelevant artists – John Updike, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen – have launched tirades against him. The most concise comes from John Irving, commenting red-faced and furious on live TV: ‘Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping write! He’s not a writer! Just crack one of his bleeping ...”

“... poetry and prose collected in many books from the 1950s until his death in 1996. Some of the small stone houses on the long, crooked main street of Stromness are built end-on so that their frontages face the stone piers that lead off the street. Cars are forced almost into shop doorways as they attempt to pass each ...”

“... private and common, a material and visual poetry that is both stony, with the sense of British stone, and precisely linear as British drawing and cutting are, a delight that we insist on recapturing across nine hundred years. What is the present content of that insistence? I find myself reflecting on the part which renaissance and renascences perennially ...”

“... in ancient paganism by the veneration of nature. Although the original purpose of the menhirs and stone circles scattered through the landscape remains obscure, it seems clear that the religion (or religions) of the ancient Britons revolved around topographical features and open-air enclosures. Many of these sites were taken over by the Christians, in a ...”