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“... later, the development of scagliola and stucco lustro, there are four types of stone that play a major part in Painting in Stone. The marble floor of the Chapel of St Andrew in Westminster Cathedral.  University of Oxford, Museum of Natural History First, there are the alabasters, which are relatively soft. These are now divided into gypsum alabaster ...”

“... Whitney were founded by patrons frustrated by the Met’s lack of interest in contemporary art (major gifts and loans were flatly refused). Once they were established, however, the Met wanted to absorb them, and secret negotiations ensued.Stettheimer’s painting imagines such a merger in the Met’s Great Hall, with museum directors, trustees, critics and ...”

“... classical material (Quintus of Smyrna) and at her own academic specialism, Elizabethan literature (John Lyly gives Helen a scar on her chin – the equivalent of the flaw in a Ming vase that perfects it). The book opens with the Iliad and closes with Derek Walcott’s novel-like epic poem Omeros, in which Helen is a servant in the house of ...”

“... to rival Oliver Goldsmith? Who else achieved lasting popular and critical success in all three major genres? The Vicar of Wakefield has never been out of print; The Deserted Village was a schoolroom favourite well into the 20th century; and She Stoops to Conquer is still performed. Despite these works, and the other poems, plays, histories, biographies and ...”

“... of short selling. In 2008 Rowan Williams spoke out against it, and his fellow archbishop John Sentamu compared short sellers to ‘bank robbers’. (In the event it transpired that the Church of England’s pension fund had been earning fees for lending out its holdings of shares to short sellers.) Being denounced by an archbishop isn’t the worst ...”

“... showed two of his early albums to Charles Rado, founder of the Rapho Agency. He passed them on to John Szarkowski, newly installed as photography curator at MoMA, who in 1963 put on what was only his third exhibition, devoted to 46 of Lartigue’s Belle Époque photographs. Lartigue was 69 when it opened. ‘Le tout New York is talking about … my little ...”

“... powerful committees – Appropriations, Foreign Relations and Finance – while of the 13 other major committees only one was not chaired by a Southerner or a firm ally of the South. On the most powerful committee of all, Appropriations, over half the Democrats were Southerners, who also provided the chairmen of six of the ten sub-committees. This, together ...”

“... bud by the fortuitous retirement of one justice followed by the death of another. In appointing John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Bush elevated to the court two jurists with track records of giving the executive branch a wide berth on matters relating to national security. (Once on the court, justices don’t always perform as expected; whether the Roberts ...”

“... of bad news. She tells Butcher that she is in the area because his neighbour Dozy Boylan owns a major Leibovitz painting, Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois. Butcher is astounded: ‘I had first seen Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois at Bacchus Marsh High School, or at least a black and white reproduction in Foundation of the Modern.’ The painting has recently ...”

“... battles when a crisis hits. But the country’s pivotal strategic position has also been a major reason for the rapid escalation of conflict over the past few months: tragically for its inhabitants, Ukraine has become the centre of an intensifying contest between Russia and the West. What do the outside powers want? For the US and Europe, the aim has ...”

“... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...”

“... or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the ...”

“... in storage and taps (on occasion) the emails and internet activity of the customers of nine major companies including Google, Apple and Microsoft. The major difference from the Cheney machinery seems to be that general warrants are now dealt out, rather than no warrants at all, but general warrants don’t meet the ...”

“... their first confrontation and defeated the Islamists in Konna. But on the night of 16 January, a major gas production site at the Algerian-Libyan border, near In Amenas, was taken over by al-Mulathameen (‘the masked brigade’), an Islamist katiba (or ‘fighting unit’) based in Mali which had decided to make a response, and perhaps to signal to rival ...”

“... bequest, he could have exploited the resources of the exhibition for far longer than he did. By John Snell’s bequest of 1677, 12 exhibitions were endowed for students from Scotland to study at Balliol for periods of private study lasting up to 11 years, with the requirement that exhibitions be given to Scots who would take holy orders in the Church of ...”