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“... other, a former head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone): ‘Only Newton’s laws of motion may enjoy a wider scientific consensus than a human-enhanced greenhouse effect.’ There isn’t consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part ...”

“... and devious – and no less seductive. The ‘head’ of Helen Marten’s ‘Sparrows on the Stone’. In 2016 Marten won both the Turner Prize and the first Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. Last year she published The Boiled in Between: a novel of sorts that translates into prose some of the jam-packed erudition of her art and its ickier explorations of ...”

“... of prose pieces:I would begin with the Greek word omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it. omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water outside our back door. It is Co. Derry in the early 1940s. The American bombers groan towards the ...”

“... in the middle, a consequence in part of having a room devoted to works executed in white marble. Stone from the Dashiwo quarry, in which the artist has lately acquired a financial interest, was used to build the Forbidden City in the 15th century and, in the 1970s, Mao’s mausoleum. Ai’s installation Cao (2014) is a field of marble grass, containing a ...”

“... in Rome, covering an area of 26,000 square metres, with reputedly the largest accumulation of stone blocks in Europe. Its architect, Joseph Poelaert, inspired by John Martin’s scenes of apocalyptic ruin, had been fantasising about such a structure for years before he won the commission to design the new Palais in 1861. Time passed, costs swelled from ...”

“... The ‘Bill’ in Bill Wyman, it is not commonly known, stands for counting-up, the reckoning. Stone Alone runs to nearly six hundred pages of dogged chronology and totalling. It gives you every date the Rolling Stones played between their formation and the notorious Altamont debacle in 1969, the massive free concert outside San Francisco during which a ...”

“... Thus, Mordell’s famous conjecture from the Twenties, whose recent settlement was a stepping-stone to Wiles’s result, hypothesises a connection between the number of holes on a certain surface naturally connected to an equation and the question whether the equation has an infinity of solutions. These are highly technical considerations whose ...”

“... poetry and prose collected in many books from the 1950s until his death in 1996. Some of the small stone houses on the long, crooked main street of Stromness are built end-on so that their frontages face the stone piers that lead off the street. Cars are forced almost into shop doorways as they attempt to pass each ...”

“... are storming one of the last bastions of progressive education. So runs the latest episode in what Brian Cox terms ‘the great betrayal’: the betrayal of teachers and their pupils over the last thirty years by government interference, false ideologies and starvation of resources. The current cast of this depressing production seems to have wandered off the ...”

“... Perfection, Inevitability, Modesty, Carefulness; and the reflections Youngest Son, Dog, Hand, Stone, Green, Early Spring, North-East.Any two trigrams can be brought together to form a hexagram in two different ways. Combining Earth (Kun) and Lake (Dui), for example, produces the hexagrams:GatheringOverseeing☱☷☷☱LuiLinIn all, 64 hexagrams can be ...”

“... and his usual awkward register is almost preferable. Almost: ‘this was furious mathematics, a stone in your heart, luck, and the chance of an eventual card – the River – that would glance you towards your fate.’ When Ondaatje is not trying to get terminologically down with his characters, he tends to hover above them, sage and loquacious, ever ready ...”

“... one more house, Lou Pérou: a renovation, undertaken when she was in her mid-seventies, of an old stone building near Saint-Tropez she had bought in 1939. There were also numerous designs for postwar housing and civic or leisure centres, all of them unbuilt. She hung on at Saint-Tropez until isolation and Parkinson’s got the better of her and then retired ...”

“... rules the patriotic lives of tens of millions, and where the Ten Commandments are engraved in stone in courthouses and state buildings throughout the land, belief in the Almighty and the ongoing maintenance of American national identity are inseparable. Nowhere is this more evident and dangerous than in the fusion of evangelical Christianity and ...”

“... of peaks and troughs. It seems to turn inwards and outwards at the same time. At the heart of Brian Cummings’s Bibliophobia is a sense of the book as a ‘liminal object’, by which Cummings means that the book is both vessel and object, something that carries and something that is: ‘a transaction between physical and mental universes’. Sometimes ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”