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“... which was designed to encourage backers for further missions, he declared that in Guiana ‘every stone that we stooped to take up promised eyther golde or silver by his complexion.’ That is pure Ralegh: it conveys enthusiasm and hope to his readers while covertly acknowledging that hope is really all he has to offer. Since he can’t honestly say every ...”

“... thousand spectators could look down on galas, diving exhibitions and fireworks displays from its stone amphitheatre. There were also beauty contests, with girls in bikinis and white stilettos parading in front of men in suits and their wives in fake pearls and cat eye sunglasses.At night, the bustle switched to the town centre. The Picture House, known as ...”

“... the new library, set to open in the autumn, will live inside a stunning disc of glass and cut stone looking out on the Mediterranean and the troubled horizons of Magna Graecia. Its capacity is said to be some eight million volumes: if its librarians fill it, the collection will dwarf that of the Mouseion and Sarapion of old Alexandria. The Library of ...”

“... have been well-crafted historical or regional romances that mine the rich inheritance of Hardy and Lawrence: yet success in other spheres made all this writing seem a semi-private, faintly eccentric activity. During a memorable televised special several years ago, Dame Edna Everage noticed Bragg in the celebrity-packed audience: hands up, she said with ...”

“... plot’ and literary impostor (a category not yet extinct). In the latest volume John Stone-house appears as politician and confidence trickster, but Harold Philby is dubbed Soviet agent rather than traitor and Klaus Fuchs gets by as theoretical physicist. Other less controversial occupations include entrepreneur, man of letters, geologist and ...”

“... but soft in focus towards the bottom where pressure is eased. Kollwitz scraped her lithographic stone with needles, and here as elsewhere this scoring of the image conveys a marking of the flesh. A history of struggle, social as well as individual, is registered in her bodies.While her dramatic print series, A Weavers’ Revolt (1893-97) and Peasants’ War ...”

“... that it was built by Africans and not some mysterious Semitic visitors.’ Since those stone ruins have an important role in the mythology of Mugabe’s African state, perhaps Selous deserves to have his name commemorated in a black capital for longer than the egregious Ewart Grogan, famous for travelling all the way from the Cape to Cairo in ...”

“... painter of authentic ‘scenes from Sicilian life’. This neglect of Verga is strange. D.H. Lawrence, who lived for a while in Sicily, discovered Verga’s work with great excitement and translated him in the 1920s. He rightly called ‘Jeli the Shepherd’ and another story, ‘Rosso Malpelo’, two of the greatest ever written. At his best, as ...”

“... of literature like a meteorite out of a cloudless sky, our very own qibla, our inscrutable Black Stone. That the first surviving Western poetry, born within a generation or two of the alphabet, should also be so well-achieved is astonishing. There is nothing tentative about the opening books of the Iliad or the Odyssey, no indication that these are ...”

“... one cemetery we visited, every gravestone had been smashed. Among the mounds of earth were large stone rams and tigers, lying on their sides. One of the rams had a bow and a quiver of arrows carved on its back. ‘These probably date from before Islam,’ I said to Akbar. There was a rifle carved on the other side. A group of four men had been slowly walking ...”

“... but the British seized a collection of antiquities destined for the Louvre – including a stone slab found at Rashid (or Rosetta) in the Delta, whose three inscriptions were already seen as a potential key to reading hieroglyphs. Words were added to the sides of the slab when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ...”

“... through heavy clay to emerge in the shock of battle. The city shudders from the silent pounding of stone ordnance, the mute thunder of that lifesize howitzer by Charles Sergeant Jagger on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Arranged on obelisks are squadrons of engineless planes that will never achieve flight. Granite battleships hide in ...”

“... and accepted it in a much less philosophical spirit. One of the paradoxes of emancipation, as D.H. Lawrence perceived, was that the bright new world did not include sex, except in bogus romantic form. But Daff was gay and witty, with the Pekinese flower face for which the cloche hat was designed (see Shepard’s illustration to ‘James James Morrison ...”

“... The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the Beagle’s return voyage to Tierra del Fuego, Jemmy Button was accompanied by Darwin, who was appalled by the Fuegians; he ‘confessed he could ...”

“... and great cartoonists in equal numbers. George was painted by Gainsborough, Hoppner and Lawrence as ‘the first gentleman of Europe’ and caricatured brilliantly by Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruickshank as a fat, farting philanderer. The ‘convex glass’ of satire was everywhere held up to counterpoint the flattering glass of fashion in the years ...”