“... moment, that printing is straightforwardly duplicative. In one copy, a peacock gazes up from the foot of the page; in another, falcons and sparrows perch on flowering tendrils which, as they twist around the margins, teeter on the edge of abstraction. In fact, Gutenberg’s Bible would have looked a lot like a handwritten text to 15th-century eyes, not (as ...”

“... exact in trapping the stage of semantic decay which had set in among words, and he hardly puts a foot wrong in his displacement of idiom. The text is replete with proverbs, saws, stock formulas, all chosen with remarkable taste. There are also numerous snatches of riddles, children’s rhymes, catches and ballads – the detective is always overhearing ...”

“... I can, for example, think of no painter who gives a fairer account than Champaigne of the foot – a part of the body which is often underanalysed, even when the structure of face and hands has been thought through.Pascal’s comment on the vanity of an art which is admired for achieving likenesses of things that are not admired in themselves is ...”

“... era of multi-party democracy. Mrs Thatcher had been eighteen months in Downing Street, and Michael Foot had become the Labour leader three months before. Britain was being pulled apart by ideology and extremism. We would draw into politics people of talent and good will – the ‘political virgins’ – who were alienated by the dogmatism and sterility of ...”

“... and that Little Dorrit is a favourite in the Home Office.’ Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and ...”

“... and slippers for women. Between 1913 and 1934, Hirshfield patented 24 designs for orthopaedic foot devices and slippers; the latter were variously adorned with buckles, pompoms, straps, bows and classical figures. Janis joked that Hirshfield’s habit of painting women with two left feet could be attributed to the fact that slipper samples ‘were made in ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... S.R. Crockett from Samoa in May 1893, eighteen months before his death: ‘I shall never set my foot upon the heather. Here I am until I die and here will I be buried.’ But, as he told another correspondent, his head was ‘filled with the blessed, beastly place [i.e. Scotland] all the time’. It was in these months that he conceived what would have been ...”

“... about Byron was his lack of self-assurance. Trelawney, who sneered behind his back at the club foot, claimed always to let himself be beaten in their races, and Byron himself wrote to a friend that he would far rather swim the Hellespont again than have to extricate himself from a painful love affair. He used, he said, to make love as naturally as he ...”

“... after Anton recounts the adoption story begins with a disclaimer. ‘But in fact I never set foot in the village of Silwad, and the whole trip to see Surayyah Sa’id is just a tale.’ Arabesques is not an autobiography, a straightforward life, at all, but something far sneakier and more complicated: a counterlife, with fiction and fact constantly ...”

“... laughed at by rustics because they have never seen him before’. Here the boot is on the other foot: it is we who have never seen these things before in poetry, and they are a new sort of wonder, exposed to us. It is an exposure that reveals the author too much, and the way his imagination works, the imagination that produced the extraordinary fantasy of ...”

“... in what seemed an uncharacteristic outbreak of clumsiness, and slightly scalded her husband’s foot. The bohemian comfort would not have revealed how poor they were, and how uncertain Sam’s future in journalism. Above all, we should have no means of knowing they had recently met an odious couple called the Wordsworths, a brother and sister, about whom ...”

“... said he would send a fax with a few of his thoughts on market principles; there was a period of foot shuffling, after which Maslyukov told Sachs that faxes were not in the plan, nor in GosPlan. Now he is back in circulation: padded with flesh, courteous, a member of the Duma, chairman of its economic committee, already tipped to become economics minister if ...”

“... inhabit a squalor to which the author’s rhyming resources are more than equal. His numb left foot disturbed a rat that nested Inside a soup can. Someone’s pedal bike Distorted to surrealism rested On old wet Suns. With rictus of dislike, Detaching shoe from shit, he danced it clean, Then rang the bell of Number 17. Those ‘old wet Suns’ reveal the ...”

“... his hair is flecked with grey. He asks me my name and I tell him. ‘I want you to change my bail, John. Change it. No more reporting, yeah.’ Reporting at a police station is a common bail condition imposed by the courts. ‘Will you accept anything else?’ ‘Anything, John, yeah. Just lift that one. Get that one done ...”