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“... or the Virgin Mary. Ted Hughes wrote a poem for the same place on the same occasion, incised in stone, in the square with Larkin’s. The poem does not feature in this handsome slim collection, at least I don’t think it does, for Hughes was not the Laureate at the time, and these are his Laureate verses. But as it happens, the little commencement epigraph ...”

“... books indicate. I would not bring up this point if Private Eye were not such a glasshouse of stone-throwers. McKay quotes a colleague saying of the new editor: ‘I don’t think people like midgets, especially pushy midgets’: this editor is also despised for losing his hair too early in life. Richard Ingrams, the previous editor, is condemned for his ...”

“... weaves together the lives of the famous, the obscure and the forgotten. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning plan their elopement. Samuel Rogers entertains the Gräfin Hahn-Hahn, a romantic novelist who has come to meet her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a ...”

“... religions; and the changes from one practice to another, like the change from long barrows to stone circles, or the later and sudden abandonment of henges, even the ‘superhenges’ that had taken a huge amount of labour to create, may have been the result of upheavals fully as great as the conversions of pagan Celts and Anglo-Saxons to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than Harrison’s vigorously clanking sonnet sequence in which the rhymes ...”

“... experience: for many years he had a house in Vermont where he taught himself to build dry-stone walls. There’s a sense in which his approach to cultural history resembles the careful methods of a craft in which so much depends on the builder’s eye for shape, size and weight, and on the fine sense of contour which ensures that each undressed ...”

“... label round his neck now. Even in its time it contributed more to publicity than to enlightenment. Robert Conquest, as editor of the group’s anthology New Lines (1956), claimed that what the members had in common was a ‘negative determination to avoid bad principles’. What bad principles? It fell to Davie to define as well as to denounce these evils, or ...”

“... for example, extends an important theory of how things move against their nature (e.g. how a stone continues to move upwards when propelled) to the natural motion of all bodies, including the heavenly bodies. This is the theory of impetus which says that the stone continues to move because an impetus or motive force is ...”

“... particular dream had its price, even apart from the death of the dreamers. It turned hearts to stone, it was part of the old myth of sacrifice Yeats himself used to be so eloquent about. But it also changed the world, and took the dreamers out of ‘the casual comedy’ that seemed to be their life, associating them with a ‘terrible beauty’ that ...”

“... a kind of Atlantis of the European mind, as vivid beneath the waves as it was above them. Norman Stone and Michael Glenny’s book is a scrapbook of Atlantis, an oral history of survivors from the sinking. Many of them were in their eighties when Glenny’s tape-recorder finally reached them in their close, cluttered rooms and for this alone – preserving ...”

“... in 1952 and now buried under the statue of Harry Truman in Athens – that he commissioned a stone frieze to mark the occasion. Well, it could be a fish or it could be a large Cornish pasty – the sculptor was not a master of his art. In Rome on 15 October, they sacrificed one of the horses of a winning chariot team and then cut off its head and ...”

“... it comes at the weary end of a line that stretches through books by Peter Blake, Brent Brolin, Robert Venturi and others right back to Jane Jacobs’s epoch-breaking attack on Le Corbusier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, over twenty years ago. Of course, all this has guaranteed Wolfe a readership whose anti-modern reflexes had been well ...”

“... whose Flora (1665) Evelyn also pillaged, is not distinguished from John Ray, the great botanist. Robert Boyle appears as ‘Mr Royle’ and is solemnly indexed as such. The editor has no great pretensions to be either a classical scholar or an expert on English 17th-century history; and he deserves gratitude for his labours on a difficult text. It is a shame ...”

“... of winged poetry’, but he wholeheartedly endorsed the commission’s findings. As far as I.F. Stone was concerned, the commission had ‘done a first-class job’. He accepted the ‘lone killer’ thesis as ‘conclusive’ and called on those still convinced of Oswald’s innocence to carry out their investigations ‘in a sober manner’. He worried ...”