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“... wife, Rebekah. He dreams repeatedly of ‘a night-time City, – of creeping among monuments of stone perhaps twice his height, of seeking refuge from some absolute pitiless Upheaval in relations among Men’. He’s a decent chap, but regretful and prone to resentment. As a team, M&D are a bit like Eric and Ernie, as comic, as equally matched and with a ...”

“... ex-prisoners, inhabit that section of Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’ which uses the image of a stone in a stream (‘Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream’), and if they are the men in whom ‘too long a sacrifice can make a ...”

“... After the putsch collapsed, Gorbachev doggedly resumed his search for the philosopher’s stone which would turn a disintegrating empire into a functioning union. The coda of his political life was his effort to bring the republican leaders to sign something which could paste over the widening cracks between them. In this he was assisted by Grigory ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring like that other JFK from the Irish-American world ...”

“... tells us he agreed to become Washington’s surrogate because the State Department honcho, Richard Armitage, threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if he didn’t. What really worried Islamabad, however, was a threat Musharraf doesn’t mention: if Pakistan refused, the US would have used Indian ...”

“... fascinated enough people to be given hagiographic treatments in the 1980s and 1990s by Alzina Stone Dale and Joseph Pearce. More critical studies by Ian Ker and William Oddie have emphasised the links between a life spent joyfully giving no thought to the morrow and the apologetic books, which argue that only Christian belief can supply a maximum of ...”

“... football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... million masks a day to the US. He received no response.The president says: ‘I learned a lot from Richard Nixon … I study history.’With the high rate of infections and deaths among Native Americans, Doctors without Borders is sending teams into the Navajo Nation, where healthcare is gravely inadequate. In South Dakota, the Cheyenne River Sioux set up ...”

“... staring back at us from the first volume of My Struggle like something both ancient and fresh: a stone-tablet model, a yassified Noah.This latest novel embodies all of Knausgaard’s known qualities. It takes place over two days, and it lasts forever – well, 666 pages, to be exact. The long, looping sentences of My Struggle have been replaced with ...”

“... cooks, cleaners, sailors and security operatives.Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe. I had the notion that somewhere behind and beyond the sharp-eyed sociological expeditions she undertakes was a General Theory of Everything. A resolution of that terrible inundation coming from all sides at once: our ultimate ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... or its Xeroxed millennial version, is represented by the shabby grandeur, the misplaced Portland stone pomposity of the defunct Shoreditch Town Hall; a Renaissance palazzo, strident with towers, Ionic columns, allegorical figures and upbeat sloganeering: ‘More Light, More Power’. The scale of this structure, its link with Shoreditch Church broken by the ...”

“... generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting jacket, trailing strips of coloured cloth and daubed with patches of colour that reflected Thayer’s interest in harlequin costumes. It’s not clear whether ...”