“... The Vikings themselves couldn’t write, except for short runic inscriptions carved in wood or stone, and had no dating system beyond ‘the fourth year of King Olaf’ and so on. Royal succession was the only way to mark time. The sequence of events we refer to as the Viking Age was put together from the accounts of their many victims, from Ireland to ...”

“... and accepted it in a much less philosophical spirit. One of the paradoxes of emancipation, as D.H. Lawrence perceived, was that the bright new world did not include sex, except in bogus romantic form. But Daff was gay and witty, with the Pekinese flower face for which the cloche hat was designed (see Shepard’s illustration to ‘James James Morrison ...”

“... and sagacity in deciding on policy and of conspicuous tenacity in having it carried out’ with Lawrence Stone’s shrill insistence that ‘as a hated Scot, James was suspect to the English from the beginning, and his ungainly presence, mumbling speech and dirty ways did not inspire respect.’ According to ...”

“... The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the Beagle’s return voyage to Tierra del Fuego, Jemmy Button was accompanied by Darwin, who was appalled by the Fuegians; he ‘confessed he could ...”

“... mountains were his theme, Nature the force that made him strong, This day died one who like a stone, Altered the course of English song. Though the verse is formally diverse, what is original tends to feed off the fat of the 1940s, and the new influences he admitted failed to divert the course of Watkins’s poetry, still less English song. Watkins often ...”

“... and great cartoonists in equal numbers. George was painted by Gainsborough, Hoppner and Lawrence as ‘the first gentleman of Europe’ and caricatured brilliantly by Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruickshank as a fat, farting philanderer. The ‘convex glass’ of satire was everywhere held up to counterpoint the flattering glass of fashion in the years ...”

“... her pieces ‘without undue fretting over genre’. She now teaches creative non-fiction at Sarah Lawrence College but in interviews she ducks that label too.‘Werner’, the piece that follows ‘Last Night’, is based on an incident that made the news in New York City in 1991. Werner Hoeflich wakes in the middle of the night on the fifth floor of a ...”

“... smoker’s teeth to dirty orange to blue-white. Sculptural fragments, torsos, limbs, blocks of stone skewered on poles, are presented like a bead curtain, between viewer and city. Entering the museum, and looking down through the glass floor, excavations are visible, earlier layers as a part of the present structure. Hitler, as his troops advanced on ...”

“... from the minute particulars of these chipped effigies, to release deep-stored energy from cold stone. Alan Bennett has perfected another form of autobiography, the pre-posthumous diary; the present moment written backwards. The inconveniences of an insider/outsider, eavesdropping on his own sensibility. A Crabb Robinson without a Blake. A diarist reluctant ...”

“... visual arts and exalted his own: ‘I who have no taste in the least for smelling to an old musty stone look upon these other curiosities with an eye to poetry.’ He has to admit that he has not been at all inspired on the Continent: ‘should you enquire after my Muse, all that I can answer is that I belive she did not cross the channel with me.’ If he ...”

“... which is why the Science Fiction of galactic empires is such a typically American form. Since D.H. Lawrence and the rise of Hollywood we have been accustomed to think of the successful mythologisers as passionate pilgrims in reverse, travelling not from America to Europe but from the East Coast towards the South-West. Such a movement, which takes place in all ...”

“... interested in exposing the hype about Bowie’s early London years: he is an editor of Rolling Stone magazine and he writes the sort of book that rock-stars’ managers read. Young actors, making a name, often romance about their background and are lumbered, in middle age, with a false biography. David Robert Jones was born in Brixton and thought he could ...”

“... Yet for around six hundred years prior to 1100 AD, fifty thousand people inhabited a spectacular stone city in a region surrounded by fertile fields. Both lake sediments and the icecap reveal that rainfall decreased abruptly around 1100 AD when the higher (and thus potentially drier) fields were abandoned, as was the grand city itself. Rainfall didn’t ...”

“... wild, hectic Greenwich Village, the hot streets of Manhattan, ‘its echoing cataracts of iron and stone’. We can almost hear the title being jazzed up: Dowson’s Propertian lament for Cynara is turning to Cole Porter’s ‘Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion’. The peaceful Sussex marriage has gone with the wind: ‘From Adam and Eve to Scarlet ...”

“... England to benefit from insulin treatment was a young physician at King’s College Hospital, R.D. Lawrence, who survived to become England’s principal authority on diabetes. The experiments carried out by the Toronto team were, as sometimes happens when great discoveries are announced, the subject of sour and unfair disparagement – in this case, by a Dr ...”