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“... of Canterbury clogged up and were not fixed; in Cirencester the forum was kept clean but the stone flooring, which had worn paper-thin, was not replaced. There may still have been rich people living comfortably, and there are signs that some big landowners extended their estates as smaller ones had to sell up, but it didn’t do them much good, once the ...”

“... hard to think of any respect in which the Claimant resembled Roger. He was already 13 and a half stone, in contrast to the wraithlike Roger, and was to reach massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by 1871. Though Roger was half-French and had grown up in France, the Claimant couldn’t speak a word of the language. Roger ...”

“... hard at work on what he anticipated as his masterpiece, a tragedy called Death of Guiscard, the Norman. He hoped the play would revolutionise contemporary theatre, transcend Shakespeare and ‘tear the wreath off’ Goethe’s head. It’s not surprising that he couldn’t finish it. After struggling with Guiscard for five hundred days and nights, he ...”

“... asked ‘whether a love of poverty helped’ him ‘use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone’. Whether he’s condemned here for not loving poverty – that is, for not being poor (as, in one account at least, Homer supposedly was) – or for wanting St Lucians to remain poor rather than grow wealthy from the tourists, is not made clear, and the ...”

“... are increasingly thought of in different ways. If you do want to know what happens to dead bodies, Norman Cantor’s After We Die offers a compact description. Within minutes, the pallor of death develops, as the blood drains from the surface capillaries and subsides deeper in the body. A few hours after death, the blood – no longer pumped round the body ...”

“... Thus in his brilliant, stylish and still necessary ‘Master Musicians’ study of 1946, Norman Suckling could write: ‘The use made by Fauré of these ancient forms of musical speech consisted ... in a development of them along lines different from those followed in the course of musical history; he went back as it were to the fork of the roads and ...”

“... book was Byt i bytie Mariny Tsvetaevoy; in a note to the English translation Angela Living-stone plausibly explains why this was abandoned in favour of the simple name: could it possibly have been translated as ‘The Living and Being of Marina Tsvetaeva’? Or ‘Marina Tsvetaeva: Her Everyday Existence and Her Higher – or Inner – Being’? Or ...”

“... I meant every word of what I said to you last night.’ I was bloody flabbergasted. He was stone cold sober by now – it wasn’t a drunkard talking any more. ‘I want you to find me a woman. You specialise in looking after the needs of older men – well, Cinders, I’m an older man, and I need a woman.’ She asks for time to think it over and Dad ...”

“... do I preach’), his politics (‘I’m a Tory who votes Labour. A “Left Conservative” as Norman Mailer so charmingly and conveniently puts it’), even his class (‘in any dialectical analysis ... we are part of them, the bosses, and should be pulled down’). At once defensive yet assured, such self-scrutiny is a disarming feature of many of ...”

“... One-Nation point of view. Although he admits that One-Nation Toryism is not a creed carved in stone, he does assume that it is a coherent political and historical phenomenon. The ideal One-Nation Tory would have recognised Britain’s weakness after 1945, abandoned the pretensions of great power, thrown in its lot with Europe as a founding member of the ...”

“... 1087, a deputation of Pisan and Genoese officials went to Sicily hoping to convince the island’s Norman conqueror to help them attack the prosperous trading entrepot of Mahdia on the Tunisian coast. In response, Count Roger I – a handsome, forthright and pragmatic man – ‘lifted his thigh, made a great fart’ and complained about the trouble that would ...”

“... the American champions at the Los Angeles games of 1932 before a Japanese team headed by the eight-stone 14-year-old Kitamura. Japanese officials had photographed every aspect of Johnny Weismuller’s famous crawl, and perfected it for their own physique, as they had perfected other aspects of Western technology. Sprawson himself has swum the Hellespont ...”

“... I also like the kaleidoscopic glints with which the building’s canopy spangles the tarmac and stone below. But something about its acid yellow, turquoise and keen green jangles me. Gillick’s array of insistently synthetic tints feels less like a reference to consumerism than a grammar of it. I wish that grammar would express something; I wish it were ...”

“... of Evesham, who were not displeased to acquire an apparently inexhaustible supply of good building stone. The 35 monks put down from their seats in the abbey choir were assured of a pension from the bureaucracy set up by Henry VIII and his details man and fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Abbot Hawford’s career was not over; he died seventeen years later as dean of ...”

“... Tartarian theorists are obsessed with is the Singer Building, a tall steel-framed tower encased in stone cladding and topped by a cupola. At one time the ‘world’s tallest building’, it was demolished with very little fanfare in the late 1960s, when public esteem for this sort of historicist architecture was at its lowest. The cover of Jean-Louis ...”