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“... Driving across America, one of the characters in Richard Powers’s new novel remarks that the whole country has become a gigantic theme park. The same impression might have been gained from reading American novels, or from going to the movies. From Oklahoma to Mount Rushmore, and from the Devil’s Tower to Zabriskie Point, the activities of being on the road and imagining being on the road feed into one another, as one might expect ...”

“... Beechcombings is a very different book from Woodlands, and rather suffers from the comparison. Richard Mabey’s intention is to use a series of ‘discursive essays’ to build up ‘a brief history of the narratives we’ve constructed about trees over the past thousand years to make them accessible, useful, comprehensible and obedient’, and to use the ...”

“... characterised Lauda’s experience of F1 has been there since the early days of motorsport, as Richard Williams shows in his capacious new biography of Richard Seaman, a largely forgotten English driver of the interwar years. During the 1920s and 1930s many drivers were gentleman enthusiasts who owned their own cars and ...”

“... to cost those who offer it so little and benefit those who receive it so much. ‘Why, then,’ Richard Sennett asks, ‘should it be in short supply?’ Though Sennett frequently defines such scarcity as a lack of ‘mutual respect’ – as if none of us, no matter who we are, gets enough of it – a good many of his examples and much of his analysis ...”

“... bark their way ashore through the rushes. That’s how I felt reading the Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning and almost universally adored (some reviewers reached for their Tolstoy; others forbade any comparisons at all) Narrow Road to the Deep North: watching tourists hoaxed by polystyrene. It used to be that a novel would put ...”

“... of winged poetry’, but he wholeheartedly endorsed the commission’s findings. As far as I.F. Stone was concerned, the commission had ‘done a first-class job’. He accepted the ‘lone killer’ thesis as ‘conclusive’ and called on those still convinced of Oswald’s innocence to carry out their investigations ‘in a sober manner’. He worried ...”

“... the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, Tom Cook, former Deputy Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, and Richard Stone, Chairman of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality. The Lawrences decided that Sir William was an unsuitable chairman, given his record in immigration proceedings. (The Observer also objected to Edmund Lawson, Counsel to the Inquiry, on the ...”

“... smouldering bundles of leaves from forest fires, or captured the sparks thrown off when chipping stone or rubbing sticks together. However it happened, the human control of fire made an indelible mark on the earth’s ecosystems, and marked the beginning of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet. In Against ...”

“... but with playback. I was in no doubt about that as a small child. I had a small deep-red memory stone lodged in my left temple, and when I was asked a question at school it moved slowly and steadily from one side of my forehead around to the other. Before it was at the midway point, I tried for the answer, knowing it was in my mind, available to me; but ...”

“... raw material that is wonderful but the discoveries it made possible. The replica of the Rosetta Stone one is invited to touch has the magic of a relic, but it is not a thing of beauty; the copying of inscriptions and the untangling of hieroglyphs and syllabaries make for an exciting narrative, but the working papers and cylinder seals on show are visually ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”

“... any impact, in the sense that their names are known and recognised. One is the English explorer Richard Burton, who arrived in 1855 and was probably the first European to enter this Muslim stronghold. The other is the nomadic French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who worked here as a trader in the 1880s, and who made the place – more than anywhere in his ...”

“... mace’ in a context which actually refers, as Milton didn’t, to the act of turning things into stone; and he makes a more spectacular appearance in a marginal note in the ‘Weimar’ section, which reads thus: ‘Du matin jusqu’au midi il roula du midi jusqu’au soir d’un jour d’été et avec le soleil couchant il s’abattit du zénith comme une ...”

“... to fit in with the theme. In ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, the silver ball hurtles along dark, stone-flagged corridors and up cobwebbed ramps, bounces off battlements and disappears from time to time into catacombs. An odd feature is an additional ball which is occasionally released, seemingly at random, and which wobbles somnambulistically across the ...”

“... materialism. Before the 19th century ended, a professor of commercial studies was casting his stone at Le Péril américain. Such prescience remained rare, however, until the First World War turned a broadly benevolent indifference into interest and self-interest, then into irritation, and finally into apprehension that The American Cancer (a title of ...”