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“... to the skirts of the old Reading Room, a table is laid with portable derivatives of the Rosetta Stone. The number of them hints at a BM merchandising frenzy: for sale, and I may have miscounted, are a mug, a mouse-mat, a ceramic tile, a tie, a teacloth, a scarf, a T-shirt and two sizes of replica, all of them stamped with a presumably random excerpt from ...”

“... his The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. has been reviewed in these pages, nor are Norman Stone, James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes always less fanciful. And if Hitler’s personality remains an unanswered question, so too, does the history of National Socialism – which a book like Robert Harbison’s recent ...”

“... through iron gratings into family vaults, with the names of the occupants chiselled above on stone panels. In another part of the cemetery are the slum quarters – crosses of rough stone, some of them leaning sideways, or upright stone slabs, or just oblongs of gravel enclosed by ...”

“... Robert Hughes begins his autobiography, as he began his recent book on Goya, by describing the road accident in Western Australia that nearly killed him in 1999, and his subsequent ordeals in hospital and in court. In this new book he expands on the treatment he received from Australian journalists and in particular on the allegation made by a local reporter that he had referred to a prosecution lawyer descended from Indian migrants as a ‘curry muncher’, which was then repeated by a succession of other journalists ...”

“... you would hardly think so from his portrait. The earliest dateable likeness is the engraving by Robert Vaughan, done in the mid 1620s, when Jonson was around fifty. The face is jowly, bearded, dour, heavily lived-in. The shadowed eyes remind me of photos of Tony Hancock. Comedy, they seem to say, is no laughing matter. It was one of Jonson’s sayings that ...”

“... he is fascinated by those activities that suggest dialogues between matter and consciousness – stone-carving, clay-moulding, carpentry and other crafts. He shares Pound’s enthusiasm for a wide range of languages and cultures and has memorably translated in the Poundian manner. In particular, he has a keen interest in Chinese poetry and thought, which ...”

“... brass-hinged box, or carved sarcophagus, to hold them. The titles of these pieces are penny plain: Stone Container, Guillemot Boatman (reproduced here), Cuckoo, Rocking Horse Skull, Seal Oil Stone, Hooded Crow. Lists of ingredients are given with each sculpture, lists that read like ...”

“... for over an hour talking to Neal Ascherson. It was one of those freezing January evenings – cold stone, long shadows – and we adopted our BBC faces in Poets’ Corner, looking at the memorials and marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo ...”

“... in the 18th century. The drawings are gathered together in The Four Books on Architecture (Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield’s 1997 translation is the most recent), which are still a source for modern architects. Palladio’s origins may explain his books’ directness. He worked with his hands – he was a ...”

“... more so because it alters so much as the winds and currents urge and reposition the four types of stone that compose the spit. Now it resembles the tail of a ray or skate, now it’s a sea-tangle head, now it’s a hand whose forefinger points westward. Sometimes it settles down as the head of a bear with an eye and snout that look east in July, west in the ...”

“... there is no obvious leader of the tophet cult, innovations in one sanctuary, Carthage’s use of stone markers, for example, often spread to others. Cities outside the circle, such as those in the Levant or in Spain, show no signs of adopting their practices. Infant sacrifice becomes a marker of cultural distinction, separating a geographically close set of ...”

“... be compiled, the verses had to be copied ‘from scraps of parchment and leather, tablets of stone, ribs of palm branches, camels’ shoulder blades and ribs, pieces of board and the breasts of men’. Even then there were problems, as the earliest manuscripts of the Koran were not only unvowelled, but also lacked the diacritical points that ...”

“... and tore away ‘every illusion’ he had ‘ever held about the Jewish state’. And for Robert Fisk, who no longer had illusions about that or anything else, it was a year in which he escaped death a score of times and lived to produce some of the most memorable journalism of the decade. Sharon’s book is a surprise, for it contains little about ...”

“... to illuminate their understanding of old familiar scenes. Among the professionals must be included Robert and Monica Beckinsale; among the self-confessed amateurs, Richard Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the ...”

“... in the years up to 1917, before the arrival of British troops, by German archaeologists led by Robert Koldewey. The perspective drawings suggest something closer to a modern town planner’s ideas than to the crowded souks and tenements that one imagines, on the evidence of old Istanbul or Fez. But all ages, whatever their evidence, manage to give ...”