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“... Through Alexandria to Loch Lomond past the indigenous Argyll Motors Factory with its built-to-last Stone car over the door. People call you odd, Determined, unchaperoned, ‘fast’. Your wheels cover Scotland, familiar and intimate, Tin-Lizzying Right up Ben Nevis, mass-produced, Laughing with the dash of the woman driver’s TS1, first car in Dundee. Your ...”

“... on West 60th Street and held the menu up to the light, scrutinising it as if it was a precious stone. He ordered iced tea and turned to me. ‘I come here all the time,’ he said. ‘It means you can sit next to your friend and hear what they’re saying. It’s good to hear what your friend is saying.’ ‘Maybe half the time,’ I said. He laughed and ...”

“... down Maes Howe’s Five-thousand-year-old chute, Walked unbowed down its entrance passage Whose stone slabs weigh forty-five cars. Nine chased Nine with dog-track speed Round Orphir’s circular kirk, Dropped down rung after midnight rung Metres into Wideford Hill. Nine and Seven bounced and drummed On the capstone over Brough of Birsay’s Pictish ...”

“... In the section of The Anatomy of Melancholy devoted to the perils of religious enthusiasm, Robert Burton pauses briefly to comment on the complex and meritorious rituals of the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca: their fastings, their running till they sweat, their long prayers, Mahomets temple, tombe, and building of it, would aske a whole volume to dilate: and for their paines taken in this holy pilgrimage, all their sins are forgiven, and they are reputed so many saints ...”

“... Croy. Ee. Gaw. Thrawnly as a couple long and long for a child, Hopelessly, edgily, until their own stone opens. Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Pit: to dig holes, marking an edge. Pit: a portion, or a piece of land, a homestead, Pittenweem, Pitmillie, Pittodrie, Pittencrieff. Pit: the only syllable we know Was born from the obliterated Pictish language – One ...”

“... private secretary is given a family set of rooms in Albany where, ‘coming in off the chilly stone staircase, Maxim and Agnes had walked through a time gate, back seventy-five years to the days when the Empire was built of solid dark mahogany and pictures of dead animals.’ A Secret Service chief disappears in Joseph Hone’s The Flowers of the Forest ...”

“... himself in knots for the sake of consistency: a character called Alex Pierce, a writer for Rolling Stone whose research seems to be a fantasticated version of White’s, urges himself at one point to ‘head back to Marley’s house’. Marley isn’t left blank, exactly: we hear quite a lot about his under-the-table philanthropy, his physical beauty, his ...”

“... painstaking figure, made thin and watery by the rising, mirage heat, as if someone had thrown a stone into the pool of air through which it walked and ripples diluted it.’ Crace’s insubstantial Jesus is barely glimpsed by the others. It is hard not to think of another place of rock and no water. Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I ...”

“... in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea that a place or ...”

“... at Eye-level. Here’s the whole shebang that is Time, place and climate, ebbing, dancing, set In stone and motion, calmly at the ready Before and after, purled in helices, Every last atom pregnant with an A. Oan Paip J2 Genua cui patrem, genitricem Graecia, partum pontus et unda dedit, num bonus esse potes? fallaces Ligures, et mendax Graecia, ponto nulla ...”

“... at the beginning of the book: ‘He himself had taken a fancy to his father’s blood kin, as the stone-carver fancies the shapeless block from which he intends to carve a fine, noble shape, the work of his hands.’ The metaphor of the sculptor recurs, obviously triggered by the fact that Moses will carve the ten ‘words’ (as the Hebrew puts it) in ...”

“... shone. A comet. A meteor. Shone, His shell a re-entering rocket, a capsule straight down like a stone From outer peace. Och, plunged in the innermost space Of the dream, he was sure he had lost, and so sure he had won In his way, and would have his day, the Spring Day Of the Slow Start. He played his part Well. He sang his dream and in the spring its claim ...”

“... wants to be William Wallace.’ ‘No,’ Martin corrected him. ‘Alex Salmond wants to be Robert the Bruce.’ Wallace has been cast as ‘the people’s champion’, a role he played in the 1975 novel The Wallace by the prolific Nigel Tranter and, twenty years later, in Braveheart. But Martin was right that the appeal of Bruce would be significantly ...”

“... it is an end in itself, as it is not for that other object of infinite search, the philosopher’s stone. Alchemists at least knew what they wanted, how to set about looking for it, and what it would do once it had been discovered. The writers of Grail romances often barely knew what their knights were to look for, or how they should reach it, let alone what ...”

“... into transcendental meditation and gets written up as a Muscovite avatar of a character out of Robert Stone or Joan Didion: Often silences fell between us. Much of the time I felt that she was not in my company at all, nor I in hers. She would close her eyes for long, still minutes, smiling crookedly … I don’t know how she conceived of me. She ...”