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“... keep my eyes on the narrow stones which form a kerb. One, two, and the third is a raised, blueish stone, the colour of a bruise, and on this stone, perhaps because it is the colour of a bruise, I will fall and howl.At No. 58, for some years, the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her ...”

“... when the focus on the hinterlands of Dundee seems too archaically soft. Air-psalters and pages of stone Inscribed and Caledonian Under these leaf-libraries where Melodious lost literature Remembers itself! There’s a whiff here of the loftily musing Poet; there’s something a little stagey about that exclamation-mark, but such worries vanish with I do not ...”

“... of the rising flames, the way a sculptor can imagine the pose of a figure hidden in a lump of stone. And when it’s lit, it follows a precise, gradual, steady pattern of burning, just as Miyake planned. His bonfire is like a well-made story, and represents the opposite of the earthquake: man in control of a destructive force of nature (but not ...”

“... referred to me. The sick pay ended and I was back on just income support. My consultant, Harry, said I was suffering from Jungian synchronicity. This meant, according to him, that I ascribed to coincidences my own weird meanings. I thought Jung had something more sinister in mind. That they were not just coincidences. Bill Clinton ...”

“... One of the Hells Angels symbols, a ‘1 per cent’ inside a diamond, is still etched on a great stone at the entrance to their kingdom. In Hells Angels lore it stands for the 1 per cent who are outlaws. But the Night Wolves have engraved a new text around the diamond, transforming its meaning: ‘In heaven there is more joy at the 1 per cent of sinners who ...”

“... was still using it a generation later (‘I know the art of Curlism, pretty well,’ his persona Harry Wildfire boasts), and the phenomenon still flourishes in the media today, though without the ingenious, gleeful panache of its first and greatest exponent. But you won’t find ‘Curlism’ in Johnson’s or more recent English dictionaries, including even ...”

“... Maillart or Frei Otto. For them, construction – the business of embodying a design in brick, stone, steel – takes on its proper importance. In the heroic age of English engineering, engineer-contractors like the Stephensons dominate. Professional institutions have encouraged their members to keep the commercial side of building at a ...”

“... of the hair, which can in fact be paralleled by heads engraved on gems fashioned out of hard stone and bronze and found at Herculaneum. There is no indication of where we can see this statue (the Archaeological Museum in Florence), what it is called (the Idolino), and where it is illustrated. Nor are we told what comparative material the author is ...”

“... is told in The Persian Sensation: ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ in the West, at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, where the collection, at more than 400 editions, outdoes even Heron-Allen’s; the curators attempt to counter the decadent tendencies of the past with material on the poem’s life in present-day Iran. In his useful new ...”

“... has bought a different three-for-two airport paperback – one has Pity the Nation, another has Harry Potter, another has Dan Brown. But the texts keep morphing into Arabic in front of the readers’ eyes: انجيلينا   Angelina بانانا   Banana تيتيكاكا   Titicaca ‘All the travellers’ books, to their great ...”

“... that season please him: ‘Also finally finished Mr Williams’s dame-and-dago drivel about Mrs Stone. It is, well, pathetic.’ A month later, he was not pleased by Stephen Spender’s World within World: ‘What a spurious book – him and his homosexual affairs that were only “undertaken in a spirit of opportunism”. I’ll say. Seriously though, it ...”

“... 18th century. And never can an amateur production have had a stranger setting; effectively, the Stone Age crossed with Newgate. The first boatloads of 730 convicts (160 female) and 250 free persons, mainly marines, left England in May 1787 under the command of Captain (later Governor) Arthur Phillip, reaching Botany Bay nine months later. Finding the ...”

“... David tells the story of a BBC script conference in Belfast in the late Seventies. A playwright, Harry Towb, had submitted a script about Ulster’s part in the Second World War. There was a line in it about a young guy, Ray Hughes, who’d joined the British Army – ‘amazing, and him a Catholic!’ one character chipped in. David had objected ...”

“... which begins, ‘Long night succeeds thy little day;/O blighted blossom! can it be/That this gray stone and grassy clay/Have closed our anxious care of thee?’ The vicar of Shepperton church, where she was buried, objected to the first line because it made no provision for immortal life; he and Peacock quarrelled bitterly over it. Jane went mad with ...”

“... briefly leaves himself to become his lover, he feels, ‘in the ongoing rush and clatter of being Harry’, not just his hopes and fears but ‘something else’: ‘The sum of his days’. At the opening of The Hours (1999), Virginia Woolf lies drowned at the bottom of the river while the scene unfolding on the bank slowly enters the wood and ...”