“... removal of ruins and the burning of ancient marbles for lime. Other popes followed his example. As David Karmon showed some time ago, the movement to conserve ancient sites in their current state was born in the same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story ...”

“... to secure the conviction of radicals. In 1794 he had prosecuted the Manchester reformer Thomas Walker for a treasonable conspiracy on the basis of evidence he knew to be perjured. In order to prevent the court hearing evidence of the perjury, he had attempted, apparently on the advice of John Scott, the then attorney-general, to persuade the judge to call ...”

“... regius professor. But Trevor-Roper was always a highly physical creature. He was a phenomenal walker in the Borders or the Peloponnese, and would appear in college after ‘a short stroll’ of 38 miles in the Cotswolds. Above all, he developed a lifelong passion for hunting. Horses rolled on him; he lost his spectacles in ditches. But an alluring meet ...”

“... alongside the new site, were required as parking space for the 2012 green Olympics. Johnnie Walker, chairman of the Hackney and Leyton Sunday Football League, was enraged: despite assurances from a multitude of faceless authorities that work would not begin for four years, the diggers arrived before the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled ...”

“... could be quite so smug. He often finds solace, by contrast, in American pop culture, in the Walker Brothers, Elvis and Suicide tracks that punctuate his films, or in the films of his hero, Sirk.One of the things Penman mentions in passing – I wish he’d said more – as he goes on his late-night Fassbinder binges is the relative sympathy for ...”

“... story. The Gallions Reach view offered a route map into past and future.My new friend, a true walker in a weathered baseball cap, had once been a local man, from Woolwich. He had escaped to Shropshire but was drawn back time and again. For employment he had been, for forty long years, a dustman (sanitation and hygiene operative) in Newham. I told him that ...”

“... brightest hours with labour; Rest comes sure and soon. The American author of the words, Anna Walker, is invoking the declaration of Christ himself (John 9:4): ‘I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... hundred artefacts were sent from Tervuren to North America for a touring show, organised by the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis; among them was Ne Kuko’s emblematic figure. In 1973, Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire (as he had renamed the DRC), insisted that he wanted them back. Between 1976 and 1982, once the term ‘restitution’ had been ruled ...”

“... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...”

“... sentiment in Liverpool. But there were more Leylands than Roscoes, and not just because, as David Eltis reminds us in his deeply researched new book, slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... had already retired from the ministry when he began the vast task of translating Kierkegaard, and David Swenson died in the middle of translating the great Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was, however, completed by Lowrie, and first appeared in 1941. But in 1941, there were other, more pressing things to think about, and it was not until Sartre and ...”

“... true, when so much else has changed? To the traveller passing at speed, even to the hiker or dog-walker, farmed fields are anonymous elements that contribute to a pattern. It’s the landscape the eye seeks, not any of the fields making it up. Most fields have no individuality to a stranger; at best, a fine oak in the middle, or a pretty horse grazing. Few ...”

“... picnic she takes to St James’s Park) or pointlessly accretive (‘A young man, tall as a stilt-walker and with the same stiff-legged gait, came and sat on the opposite bench. He put his motorcycle helmet on the ground. He ate a sandwich in four large bites. Something in his jacket crackled like a radio’). It seems unlikely that shy Nazneen would look at ...”