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“... very strong as a man who understands these matters. In a comprehensive attack on the reputation of Robert Lowell, in 1973, he wrote as follows: ‘Endless, aimless consecutive sentences. The words do not coalesce into a good substance. They are difficult to say and knobbly to hear, their awkwardnesses are unconvincing, unjustifiable, they do not measure or ...”

“... strong-legged giants. But Blackie would have been shocked to learn that these towering stone warriors come not from Scotland but from Germany. A figure from the Gundestrup Cauldron, c. 100 BC - 1 AD This is a show which makes its way across two quaking bogs of controversy. What does it mean to call the European Iron Age ‘Celtic’, and why ...”

“... where it turns into something else. Even thin and unpersuasive lines (‘I don’t mind/being one stone more, the dark stone,/the pure stone that the river bears away’) show the writer hard at work on his myth, and the myth itself, when fully functional, is magnificent, a ...”

“... with the ousted Rebekah Brooks. News Corp shares in free-fall. One would need a heart of stone not to gloat. Murdoch’s initial response to the crisis in closing the News of the World was acclaimed by several commentators as ‘brilliant’ but ‘ruthless’. That verdict seems at most half-correct. In fact, by folding NotW so early in the ...”

“... My Junior Suite makes me feel like Mussolini, it is huge. I think of the edifice as Salazar in stone. Salazar’s slogan for Portugal was ‘Proudly Alone’, My kind of dictator. He wanted a grand hotel in Lisbon And arranged to have one. I consider that admirable. It’s all downhill From the hotel. You walk downhill all day On the Avenida de la Libertad ...”

“... aside the genre known as ‘Imitation’, in which poets like Samuel Johnson, Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell have done such marvellous things. A verse translation may aim to be an independent modern work in its own right. Or, I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the ...”

“... was William Camden’s ponderous official history, then the influential courtier biographies by Robert Naunton, Froude’s probing critique, the rigorous constitutionalism of A.F. Pollard, and so on to John Neale, his pupils and colleagues, and beyond to Peter Lake and John Guy. So often studies of Elizabeth’s reign are impossible to disentangle from the ...”

“... attached to it. Adams and Frantz describe in detail one deal in which Clifford and his partner Robert Altman, well-known in Washington social circles since he was married to Wonderwoman, bought and sold shares through BCCI and ended up with $9.8m in their pockets. Kerry reveals that Clifford’s and Altman’s firm was paid some $45m in legal fees by ...”

“... Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous letter to the Times ...”

“... by Newton more than a century later. Here he describes how King Solomon employed the ‘vegetable stone’ – a base ingredient for alchemy, combining the four elements (earth, fire, water and air) – to make ‘trees & hearbs to flourish at all times of the yeare’ and ‘bring the birds down to him out of the air to sing and chirp & sit by him but also ...”

“... the Commissioners appointed under an Act of 1711 to oversee the building of ‘50 new churches of stone and other proper materials’: they had been advised by both Wren and Vanbrugh that no burials should take place in or around the new buildings. It was only in 1804 that coffins had begun to pile up. Colin Kerr, the architect overseeing the ...”

“... over Moray Place. Most of the windows were dark and a notion of privacy seemed embedded in the stone. It must have been close to half past ten, because there was a sudden burst of fireworks over Edinburgh Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis ...”

“... He tried this out on the theologians, and had to be treated to a firm doctrinal lesson by Bishop Robert Grosseteste on the spiritual inferiority of coronation to the anointing involved in priestly ordination. But priest or not, at Westminster, the king at his coronation would stand, as the emperors stood, on a disc of Roman porphyry, and at the centre of a ...”

“... falling apart; every light goes out in my brain, and my hand falls on the paper, motionless as a stone. Help me, help me ... Do not abandon me; think that not only I would die, but also your work ... The one who dictates inside is you; without you, my hand becomes a stone. That such intense investment is fostered by ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”