“... Diocletian’s Palace, which leads into the basement halls. The smack of sulphur, hot air and cold stone is sharp on the nose. Underfoot is damp. The vaults echo with canned folk music, tourists, some wearing togas and plastic laurel wreaths, and stalls loaded with coral, turquoise, ‘I Croatia’ baseball hats and very bad prints of Rod Stewart. The visitor ...”

“... prosperous shores nostalgic tourists would return to visit ‘the gray ruin and the mouldering stone’ of England. Her essay ‘On the Pleasure to be extracted front Objects of Terror’ analysed the Gothic mode as just that. It was a kind of reductio for literary purposes of Burke’s notion of the sublime as the manifestation in nature of wonder, awe ...”

“... 14th century; the Van Eycks had forebears and colleagues involved in this production line, such as Robert Campin, who also embraced oil paint. Captivated by pictorial exports from Siena, Flemings were now keen to commission works that stood halfway between the public arrays of stone-carved saints and the little pictures in ...”

“... Randolph Churchill in 1968. Gilbert is constructing a latterday Blenheim in scholarship instead of stone, a monument that will endure whatever the critics say of it. And only a very dim or disordered critic could fail to recognise the achievement. Three massive volumes of the biography proper, with seven companion volumes comprising just about every notable ...”

“... And this is how Felstiner deals with them: Through the dazing splendor, through the night of stone, let me plunge my hand and let there beat in me, like a bird a thousand years imprisoned, the old forgotten human heart! The difference between these passages is not one of literal sense, but of manner. Neruda strives for something that is ...”

“... health and food was also one reason why Samuel Pepys held an annual, midday, vegetable-light ‘stone feast’ to celebrate the removal of his gallstone in 1658: on 4 April 1663, Pepys and eight friends ‘had a fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish ...”

“... For decades the Barber Surgeons lanced boils, cut for the stone and trimmed whiskers indiscriminately. Then the surgical specialists got a little education, left off hairdressing and became a profession. The architects, by contrast, made no clean break between the art of building and its ancillary sciences. In the 18th century, as the profession emerged from its gentlemen-and-surveyors phase, it may have seemed that art had rules – that aesthetic and practical decisions were of the same kind ...”

“... opprobrium is Goldman Sachs. Long before Occupy Wall Street, in July 2009, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone called it ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’. He not only blamed Goldman for the housing bubble, but implied that it had survived the crash only because of its undue influence in high places: Henry Paulson, its former CEO, was ...”

“... on the Kinetoscope in 1895 by combining camera and projector in their Cinématographe. In Britain Robert Paul produced his own camera and projector when Edison refused to supply him with films. Paul also patented a design for a time machine based on H.G. Wells’s short story, in which a series of moving platforms would ‘transport’ an audience to ...”

“... makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the ...”

“... had introduced Cannadine and Cannadine had given us an encouragingly comical puff for his book, Robert Rhodes James reminded us that Lloyd George, despite doing so much to reduce the Upper House to impotence and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall ...”

“... for Robert Foster and Nancy Fried I am come to this town, over which the sun is shining, the insects briefly silenced in the renewed air of the morning, and the turnpike from the capital momentarily empty, for my wedding. I lie alone in a motel room a mile out of town and two from the campus, the wrong end of the wrong street ...”

“... arch appeared like the gateway to a secret city: loon fung now open. eat at our noodle bar. White stone lions. A warehouse displaying a profusion of richly scented produce, packets of tea with exotic designs. Red-gold fish basked in bubbling tanks, avoiding the gaze of potential diners. My meal of mushroom noodles, ‘hot and tasty’, washed down with ...”

“... Ibsen wrote them is a warning against reading the art too readily from the life, and one that Robert Ferguson has not heeded. For him, the life is the only way to support his thesis, which is that the great plays aren’t great at all, and that after Ibsen’s first success, Peer Gynt (written at Casamicciola, Ischia, in 1867), it all went horribly ...”

“... they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ‘is intended to be didactic as well as representative.’ Though the things anthologies make happen may be confined to ...”