“... example, is both passionate and convincing, as one might expect from a scholar whose New Guinea field site is home to roughly a thousand of Earth’s seven thousand languages. Aside from the ‘nine giants’ (Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese), each with more than a hundred million speakers, the rest have ...”

“... Lake Winnipeg in the wake of a smallpox epidemic in the 1830s. ‘The prairie all around is a vast field of death,’ wrote the Prince. ‘The Assiniboines . . . are, in the literal sense of the expression, nearly exterminated.’ Out of step with today’s revisionist historians, Martin is also dismissive of Indian resistance, hinting that Louis Riel, the ...”

“... and the libel laws to avoid prosecution, and Waugh felt the press had been craven. In 1977 Andrew Newton, the comically incompetent hit man who had missed Scott but killed his dog, Rinka, was released from prison and started hawking his story round the papers. Thorpe, as anxious to deny his homosexuality as the charge of attempted murder, set out to ...”

“... details but not very interested in what they meant. Not even Theodor Mommsen could rescue the field, although he managed to place epigraphy at the centre of ancient historical studies.As well as this antiquarian taint, there is also the whiff of trade: academic numismatists have to rub shoulders with amateurs, many of whom possess great technical ...”

“... launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance ...”

“... that this was the school’s great festival, or to those who pretended not to, like the Harrovian Field Marshal Alexander. There was something strangely fake about his snobbish carry-on, almost as though he was trying to convince himself that he belonged. Some of his smoking-room metaphors were merely mystifying: for example, when pondering whether Cyprus ...”

“... the work. The longer poems, all but one under the rubric, ‘Sonatas’, make their way through a field of reference and allusion – works encountered, things held dear – much as the Cantos do, although in Bunting, the journey is better planned and the sense of the poem, from line to entirety, more precise. Allegiances too, are more discreetly ...”

“... lover was finally satisfied by a rendezvous with the Duke of Wellington in the corner of a foreign field, near Brussels, in June 1815. Lady Frances’ hectic alternations of lust and shame continued to make her an alarming mistress, as Scrope Davies’s trunk, full of memorabilia, has recently disclosed. Scrope’s failure to take Byron’s advice to “marry ...”

“... a masters in defence administration, while still a serving officer. For his research he chose the field of psychometrics, the quantitative measurement of psychological traits. He persuaded the makers of MANSPEC, a psychometric assessment system for management consultants, to grant him a licence to their software. The program came on a stack of floppy ...”

“... never doubted the existence of witchcraft: he was the perfect intermediary between fieldworker and field. Yet by and by, as his own prospects dwindled, he began to feel that he was a victim of the phenomenon that Niehaus had called on him to describe in the first place: he was hexed, spellbound, pursued by forces at the beck and call of someone close, a ...”

“... Along with perhaps the most prominent contemporary conservative critic, the former US Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, Johnson expected US globalism to readjust after the downfall of the Soviet Union. When no such adjustment came – in fact, the number of bases expanded – these critics began to question whether American globalism really grew out of the need ...”

“... towpath of the Lea Navigation towards the span of the M25 overpass at Rummey Marsh. The filmmaker Andrew Kötting, the driving force of the expedition, is a stocky alpha male with a deep trench of damage in his right leg after a motorcycle collision on the Old Kent Road. He is dressed in a sack of a suit covered with marker-pen Enochian symbols. On his head ...”

“... Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and station platform. Julian Barnes’s novels are depilated at source, fat-free. Frisking them for a Moorcockian digression, a set of cellulite-heavy parentheses, would be like checking a tub of ...”

“... My Husband’, conjured mostly with clapped hands and stomped feet, which becomes a field chant, forcing ‘an awareness of what the blood knows and the mind has forgotten: a sense of origin’, as August Wilson said of the blues. Be my husband man I be your wife Be my husband man I be your wife Be my husband man I be your wife Loving all of you ...”

“... University; he is currently professor of higher education policy at Liverpool Hope University. Andrew McGettigan did his doctorate at the highly regarded Centre for Modern European Philosophy that Middlesex University summarily closed down in 2010; in recent years he has distinguished himself as one of the best-informed analysts of the legal and financial ...”