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“... or Homo erectus. The appearance of Homo erectus coincided with that of the hand axe, the classic stone-age implement, whose precise function is unknown. For more than a million years, Homo erectus and its descendants knocked out hand axes of near-identical form all over the world. Discarded hand axes may litter entire landscapes: a flawed half-made implement ...”

“... a scale model of which still stands in the grounds.A thousand years earlier, Paul of Caen and Robert the Mason began the transformation of the Roman shrine to St Alban, the first British Christian martyr, into a Norman church of handsome proportions, eventually dedicated in 1115. A succession of ambitious and not always scrupulous abbots and master masons ...”

“... The devil is in the detail, they say, and this is certainly the case with the films of Robert Bresson. And if the devil is there, God can’t be far away. Or can he? These are very curious details, bits of the real but not part of any attempt at realism, pieces of a puzzle that may not even exist. Feet, legs, hands, sand, straw, mud, laceless old shoes; dulled or hallucinating faces staring past the camera at some lost version of infinity; countless shots of the backs of persons walking away from us, or figures whose heads are out of the frame most of the time; sound effects that threaten to take over the whole movie; an old tweed suit that moves us far more than the fake blood on a man’s face; passing cars that are more interesting than a couple going through the motions of an embrace in the foreground; acting that is not so much unprofessional as non-existent, a mere reciting of lines from a too perfectly written book ...”

“... is likely to be with us for a long time. He impressed Hitler with the need to build in traditional stone, no ferro-concrete or steel girders, because only stone would endure as the imperial Roman monuments had endured. He called this his Ruinengesetz, or ‘law of ruin value’, and even made little sketches of the Reich’s ...”

“... I didn’t hold it against him personally, although I was mad at the people who picked him.’ In Robert Budreau’s film Born to be Blue, Baker plays at about this time to an audience that includes Davis and Gillespie. Gillespie is friendly, Davis is patronising. The playing was sweet, he says, ‘like candy’. He advises Baker to come back when he has ...”

“... the colonies. Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (1922) envisages England bombed back into the stone age. In The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923) Anderson Graham has Britain pulverised by African and Asian bombers whose technological superiority is reviled as the fruit of the deluded British universities that accepted foreign students. The same racist ...”

“... From then on, she was like a hunted priest in penal times, travelling dangerously with the altar-stone of the forbidden faith, disposing the manuscripts for safe keeping among the secret adherents. And inevitably, having consecrated herself a guardian, she was destined to become a witness. As a consequence, the mature work of a great poet survived, and two ...”

“... when the focus on the hinterlands of Dundee seems too archaically soft. Air-psalters and pages of stone Inscribed and Caledonian Under these leaf-libraries where Melodious lost literature Remembers itself! There’s a whiff here of the loftily musing Poet; there’s something a little stagey about that exclamation-mark, but such worries vanish with I do not ...”

“... by rumours that the Chinese were planning to kidnap the Dalai Lama, provided the perfect excuse. Stone-throwing and shouting in the streets of Lhasa quickly metastasised into a serious insurgency. Mao was delighted; ‘the Tibetan problems are very likely to be resolved by force,’ he advised the military command in Lhasa: ‘this kind of force is ...”

“... connections between, say, a Bolivian dance mask and a wooden pillow from Zimbabwe unimportant.In Robert Smirke’s King’s Library of 1828, now divested of the books it was built to house, there is a new gallery called ‘Enlightenment’.* On the shelves and in display cases you find a stuffed toucan, a Chinese brush pot, an engraving of Stonehenge, three ...”

“... history and a context. But this is not the sort of answer we get from either D.M. Thomas or Oliver Stone. Their suggestion is simpler. There is no paranoia, or paranoia is everywhere. For Thomas, this means anything goes (‘since fiction is a kind of dream, and history is a kind of dream, and this is both’). For Stone, it ...”

“... every time it’s reproduced (the poet Craig Dworkin even commissioned a version on a rug). Robert Barry’s ‘The Space between Pages’ calls attention to its own material location in a different way. Carried in 1969 by the New York avant-garde periodical 0 TO 9, it was listed on the contents page, but readers searched for it in vain. The magazine ...”

“... eventually give way to the monotony of straight and level streets tightly packed with the ornate stone homes of the dead bourgeoisie of the Belle Epoque. It is there that you will eventually come, with a shock, across Victor Noir. He is flat on his back on a slab and we look down at him, as at someone who has fallen dead on the pavement. His top hat has ...”

“... the field and the others were rounded up on the road south, at Stockport or Macclesfield. When a stone was thrown at the prince regent’s coach on his way back from the opening of Parliament that same month, Lord Liverpool’s Tory government enacted another round of repression, suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, thus enabling imprisonment without ...”

“... very strong as a man who understands these matters. In a comprehensive attack on the reputation of Robert Lowell, in 1973, he wrote as follows: ‘Endless, aimless consecutive sentences. The words do not coalesce into a good substance. They are difficult to say and knobbly to hear, their awkwardnesses are unconvincing, unjustifiable, they do not measure or ...”