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“... from when a ‘cobble’ was thrown through the window of a closed carriage; in reality, the stone came over the wall of Bedford’s father’s Schloss. ‘And for goodness’ sake don’t let’s make too much of that absurd episode – it was no flight to Varennes. My grandfather, your great-grandfather that is, faced the Luddites … Oh my poor little ...”

“... who sat bolt upright in her bed, oblivious to the surrounding tumult, as silent and unmoving as a stone deity. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of Suddenly Last Summer. Mam was not ill like this. She had nothing to do with the distracted creature who sat by the nearest bed, her gown hitched ...”

“... these beginnings, an extraordinary financial and quasi-political realm was built. Its architect, Robert Hart, was just 28 when he became Inspector-General in 1863. Rapidly winning the confidence of the Chi’ng court, he went on to create the first modern administrative system in China. Its core was a fiscal bureaucracy that assured the late imperial state ...”

“... never dreamedthat islands sixty miles apart, made of the            same stone, of nearly equal height in the same climate, could have different tenants.’ Fast forward             twenty yearsand you see him write of this scatter-burst of            rock in open sea, ‘We seem ...”

“... gimcrack show will fall to the ground, and then we shall consider how to build up an edifice of stone. For the first time! We are going to build it, we, and only we!’ ‘Madness,’ answers Stavrogin. A few minutes later, Verkhovensky, pretty much back to normal, is offering to have Stavrogin’s wife murdered free of charge. This comes as a relief. It ...”

“... made of more subtle kinds of matter than ours, but adds that a creature who can pass through a stone wall is bound to be called a spirit, and it is no use quarrelling with common language. However, all creatures with material bodies will eventually die, so if we find them around they must be capable of breeding, though not often as they are long ...”

“... and wrong that she had from her family and her time as a New Deal employee. And this model, set in stone and rubble, involved an unassailable loyalty to la causa. The disagreement, which was over Homage to Catalonia, was never properly stated, since Martha liked to get her retaliation in first. Maybe it was a disagreement over journalism. For that reason and ...”

“... and of a much more rigorous bent. Durkheim’s study of suicide, for instance, a foundation-stone of modern sociology, couldn’t be further from Burckhardt’s treatment of the same phenomenon among the Greeks, although it appeared in the year of Burckhardt’s death. Durkheim produces a taxonomy of self-killing, distinguishing positive and negative ...”

“... Passage’, he wrote:I always become, sooner or later,The thing I feel kinship with, be it a stone or a yearning,A flower or an abstract idea,A multitude or a way of understanding God.And in ‘I Leaned Back in the Deck Chair and Closed My Eyes’:Ah, all of me yearnsFor that moment of no importanceIn my life.All of me yearns for that as for other ...”

“... mind has blundered: ‘nadir to nadir’, riches to rags; in the temple of order decapitated stone figures struck from niches; mobbed cattle with their drool and ordure; at their hooves dogs. So what do you make of that? Salamis was the famous naval battle at which the Greeks defeated the Persians; but that won’t help with the phrase ‘Irish ...”

“... precede Chamberlain, and the seat of civic power, the Council House, for which he laid the first stone, is remarkable only so long as you don’t compare it with the mighty municipal edifices of Leeds, Bolton, Rochdale or Manchester.Chamberlain’s other legacy is Corporation Street, planned with great fanfare and funded with the proceeds of the gas and ...”

“... Moorhouse’s book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It’s a campaign that would surely have changed the course of history and might even have deposed Henry VIII, though this was not the rebels’ aim. They ...”

“... deception’. Improvising on characters from The Tempest in another great essay, this one about Robert Frost, Auden allocated the first of these kinds of poetry to the spritely Ariel, the second to the worldly Prospero, and suggested that every poet – meaning himself – contained some mixture of the two. But they are evidently two very different sorts of ...”

“... in the same year, his body man Reggie Love points out an image of a man’s face carved in the stone: ‘Not the profile typical of hieroglyphics but a straight-on head shot. A long, oval face. Prominent ears sticking out like handles. A cartoon of me, somehow forged in antiquity.’ They have a good laugh about it, but Obama is not smiling on the ...”

“... him to various other forms of secrecy’. He was to become a government spy when Robert Harley was Lord High Treasurer (effectively Prime Minister) and he uses the word ‘secret’ obsessively in Crusoe (it occurs five times on one page). Novak sees his experience of prison and the survival strategies to which it led as crucial to his ...”