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“... as her subtitle has it. Since historians can find no trace of the real Helen on a coin, a stone or in a factual document, the search for her leads only to dreams and fantasies. Bettany Hughes attempted an archaeological quest in her Helen of Troy (2005), but was left wistfully hoping that Helen’s tomb might be discovered one day. Maguire finds ...”

“... a demand for massive reparation payments to black Americans. The Monroe Ride was hosted by Robert Franklin Williams. Nicknamed ‘Chairman Rob’ by his supporters, Williams was second only to the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X as an outspoken advocate of ‘armed self-reliance’. The head of the Monroe branch of the NAACP in the 1950s, he assembled ...”

“... On a green hill​ above a lake in my local park in Leeds, there is a handsome stone structure. The Barrans Fountain was built by the Victorian clothing manufacturer Sir John Barran, once also the city’s mayor. He must have been a man with ambition. A building he constructed in the city centre is Moorish and beautiful, a small glimpse of Granada in the middle of West Yorkshire, though it was nothing more grand than a warehouse ...”

“... trikila, or in standard form drengiliga, ‘in manly fashion, like warriors’. The Gripsholm stone is one of 26 commemorating what seems to have been a failed expedition to the east led by Ingvar the Far-Travelled. By contrast, a rather self-satisfied stone from Yttergärde in Sweden memorialises a man called Ulf, who ...”

“... resemblance to clothes worn by ordinary women. They seem constructed rather than sewn, durable as stone with their elaborate frosting and beading, and capable of standing up on their own. But their owners worry about their survival. One appears on display only under armed guard. When a Boston shop-owner bought three of them and put them in her ...”

“... and shot by a firing squad, two at a time. There were five British victims: four Gibraltarians and Robert Boyd, a young Irish officer of the Bengal Army who’d put up most of the cash, hoping for a glamorous alternative to service in India as a grandee in Torrijos’s Spain. He was better treated, though, than Lorca would be. The Spanish government allowed ...”

“... spaces were not stamped with MoMA approval until now: neither established ones like Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson or rediscovered ones like Yayoi Kusama and Lee Bontecou; and others were rarely seen at all, such as Romare Bearden, Richard Hamilton and R.B. Kitaj in the Pop gallery, and Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica in the Minimalist and ...”

“... two new English translations, one by Robin Kirkpatrick, the other by the husband and wife team of Robert and Jean Hollander, should be welcomed. Each edition is the final volume of a long labour, and each helps the reader see this last cantica in the context of the previous two. With Virgil as his guide, Dante has already spiralled down through hell, seen ...”

“... with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but ...”

“... through those they admire, and the heroes whom Chatwin celebrates here, apart from Rock, include Robert Byron and Ernst Jünger. With Byron he shared a boyish romanticism sophisticated by intellect, a sense of the bizarre, and the gift of descriptive exactitude. In the chapter on Ernst Jünger’s Diaries (which he subtitles ‘An Aesthete at War’), he ...”

“... animal. Since writing was discovered, unceasing scribal energies have gone into the listing – on stone, on papyrus, on vellum, on Basildon Bond, on A4, on disks, on your Handipad Kwikstik Tear-offs-of historical and institutional and personal particulars: an unresting recital of ...”

“... subtle. It’s all a step up from life. We come upon a crossword clue:‘I am between water and stone fruit in India,’ declared Ben, looking up at Lilian over the Times. ‘In eleven letters.’‘Any clues?’‘None.’‘Pondicherry,’ Lilian said, after a moment’s silence.What a pleasant thing to happen on, solution and all. Hallucinating or bereft ...”

“... 1970 to wander about Ireland with a friend; we hitch-hiked our way to Connemara and holed up in a stone cottage on the edge of the ocean. Later that year, I went to Graz to study music. Ever since, I have carried around with me a mental image of the map of Europe which I find calming; it’s like a certificate of insurance against getting trapped. What I ...”

“... Island was his home. As a schoolboy of 16 in 1951 he was there with a visiting ornithologist, Robert Murphy, and Louis Mowbray, the director of the aquarium, when the extraordinary discovery was made of a surviving cahow on a tiny outcrop not far from Nonsuch Island, three centuries after it was thought to have become extinct. When he had completed his ...”

“... to be their best and most enduring. Fulcrum also published two important early collections by Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North Central and My Life by Water, and George Oppen’s Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy ...”