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“... gorgeous 13th-century mosaic Cosmati pavement in front of the high altar, and the portrait of Richard II, the abbey’s other profligate royal patron. It hangs almost unnoticed off a pier just by the West Door, the first contemporaneous likeness of an English king, and a rare instance of 14th-century northern European portraiture. The abbey, as much a ...”

“... by a tractor:    Till a tractor in summer Biting its way through the longcairn for supplies Of stone, broke open the grave and let a crowd of light Stare in at her, and she stared quietly back. A crowd of light: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Lysander says that Helena engilds the night more ‘than all yon fiery oes and eyes of light’. Gillian ...”

“... to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks ...”

“... I could find in the immediate vicinity, and the game itself began with my picking up the first stone, holding it up to my eyes, and turning it over and over until I detected, or pretended to detect, which was a difference the game obscured, a hairline crack running across it. Holding the crack firm in my sights, and keeping my head completely rigid, I ...”

“... travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental travel, rather than as a ...”

“... eventually give way to the monotony of straight and level streets tightly packed with the ornate stone homes of the dead bourgeoisie of the Belle Epoque. It is there that you will eventually come, with a shock, across Victor Noir. He is flat on his back on a slab and we look down at him, as at someone who has fallen dead on the pavement. His top hat has ...”

“... Yaqoub Caravacca, a Jordanian boy who in 1868 was hired to make a papier-mâché impression of a stone inscription, at which point he was lanced through the leg by angry Bedouins. The stone was the Mesha Stele, a huge basalt slab inscribed with linear Phoenician – an early alphabetic script – in the mid-ninth century ...”

“... probity with bronze and granite were becoming popular when, with a great piece of salesmanship, Richard Rogers persuaded Lloyd’s to accept a brilliant, unclubbable cousin of the Pompidou Centre for their headquarters. The sense of the passing of architectural time is particularly strong in London now. The Eighties boom found a city of ...”

“... Yet Piano burst into public view with the Centre Pompidou (1971-77), which, designed with Richard Rogers, is the most celebrated of the high-tech megastructures of the period, and today he is also associated with large urban schemes, including the redevelopment of the old harbour in Genoa (1985-92) and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1992-2000), as well as ...”

“... want – large, gestural, semi-abstract paintings – and other things the gallery has to offer. A stone circle by Richard Long; an early To the Studios painting by Frank Auerbach. It’s difficult to say what these might mean in a Chinese context.This internationalism is new in China, according to the fair’s director, the ...”

“... James Fox in Bloomsbury Square. There are broad steps on each side of the statue, their Portland stone now stained an aqueous green, and I like to sit beneath and between Fox’s feet, looking, with him, down Bedford Place and towards Russell Square. Like most fat men in statuary (and in life), Fox is seated for greater dignity; he is also swathed in a ...”

“... megaphone message. Such scenes of fear and loathing demand the pen of Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone chronicler of the American campaign trail, for we are in his beloved ‘bat country’, where the dark shapes of power and prejudice swoop around the heads of the bemused voters. What would he have made of the Alliance, with its Pollyanna message of good ...”

“... about the possibility of assassination. ‘If my dead body,’ he remarked, ‘were to be a stone in the bridge leading to understanding with France, then my life would not have been lived in vain.’ It was not to be. If Rathenau’s murder brought defenders of the republic together in the short run, it did not, as Volkov claims, force its opponents to ...”

“... When Richard, Duke of York, laid claim to the English throne in 1460, he presented himself as a physician, sent to heal the ills of the kingdom. In partnership with his apothecaries, the faithful Commons, he would probe ‘the root and bottom of this long-festered canker’ and separate ‘the clean and pure stuff from the old, corrupt and putrefied dregs ...”

“... Mairbh, the step of the dead. Island tradition has it that an English officer walked along this stone plank, jeered at by his recently-wedded wife who mocked his hesitation until, as he reached the end, the stone broke and he fell to his death. Across the water, in Connemara, where the Irish name for the ...”