“... so the leadership was as suddenly and completely Blair’s as if he had drawn a sword from the stone. He is now the Dauphin awaiting his inevitable inheritance and all men are on his side. His undoing is certain but it is far ahead and his courtiers do not yet talk of things like that. The upheavals in the Tory Party show a different face of the same ...”

“... by a symmetry of graceful arches and a vaulted apse. Pevsner called it ‘one of the most perfect Norman churches in England’. It is famous – in certain circles – for its programme of mysterious carvings around the exterior walls. Dozens of haunting faces, human and animal, and other creatures in-between, peer down from the corbels that support the ...”

“... the battered face of our first woman Primeperson, as she stood there triumphantly, in Coade-type stone, with her shopping basket and her safety helmet. The Commercials’ officers, guarded by a Pertinax man, were changing the bright advertising labels on her helmet and the goods in her shopping basket. As usual, they had covered over the motto around the rim ...”

“... understanding of the instrumentality of the visual image. ‘The luckiest man in Iraq,’ General Norman Schwarzkopf can be heard to quip during a notorious news conference, as footage from a missile shows a truck clearing the bridge the missile is about to strike with seconds to spare. This was by no means the first time a varied and in places richly ...”

“... love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close contact with his ‘Inner Glasgow’, a place of abolished pit bings and empty ...”

“... reflection.As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.As if the eddy could reform the pool.As if a stone swirled under a cascade,Eroded and eroding in its bed,Could grind itself down to a different core.Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never failFor they keep dancing till they sight the deer.The ‘Station Island’ sequence forms the middle section of ...”

“... that dances in its chains when it embraces intellect – love of the scrutinising brain. And the stone that’s always broken by the assiduous mind becomes a bright entire stone made harder by each new wound. Lines like these came through so strongly that I almost forgot I was reading a translation: curiosity about a ...”

“... recalls Sixties youth rebellion. But there is an older New York tradition which is evoked. Like Norman Mailer, Wolfe has a nostalgic hankering for the old brawling Irish politics of 19th-century New York: the Irish are, as it happens, the only New York ethnic group who are not slandered by this novel. A hundred years ago, Irish politicians routinely took ...”

“... Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the years (1925 and 1928 respectively) lie like little marble asps, waiting to keep their dates. Who knows what decided the cemetery ...”

“... about the language of architecture; exactness and detail v. mood and feeling. Betjeman wrote to Norman Scarfe to praise his ‘magnificent’ book on Suffolk’s landscape and its history, and each sentence is an attack on Pevsner. ‘You write beautifully. You inform without dehumanising. There is not a hint of art history, thank God, but love of the ...”

“... she has indeed done that. The same or corresponding dating methods have been usefully applied to Stone Age sites sometimes very distant in time. But it has been the fixing of a broadly reliable Iron Age chronology across two millennia at its broadest spread that has had the greatest effect in revising or destroying old convictions of the ‘no ...”

“... migrants featured pagan symbols (Odinn’s raven, Thor’s hammer) on their coins. Unlike Anglian stone crosses of the eighth century, authentic banners of a transformed faith, Northumbrian sculpture after the Danish settlement drew copiously on pagan myth and heroic legend. This last point is one of many significant things to emerge from Richard Bailey’s ...”

“... he droned on about football and Neville Chamberlain, unable to make eye contact. For Oliver Stone, who dramatised the event in his clumsy 1995 biopic, this was the moment Nixon received the revelation of what Stone called ‘the Beast’: even though he, the president, may want peace, the system won’t let him stop ...”

“... does so, on the one hand, through a refined use of materials (sometimes as traditional as wood and stone), which helps to ground his buildings in particular sites, and, on the other, through a suave display of engineering (often in light metals and ceramics), which associates his designs with the contemporary world of advanced technology. This skill is ...”

“... in gung-ho exercises. A design for the Canadian Estate at Bulford. Two birds with one stone: the A303 should be diverted north just west of Parkhouse crossroads (the site of the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, when police from Wiltshire and five adjacent sties plus troops in porcine disguise ambushed and assaulted New Age travellers en route to ...”