“... changed. Canada geese came years ago; now there are also Egyptian geese, and what I think are pink-foot geese. One winter I watched shoveller duck swimming round after each other in a circle. There are fewer tufted duck and mallard than there were. A couple of years ago, a pair of ruddy duck arrived: small, sexually aggressive stifftail ducks with bright blue ...”

“... behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women ...”

“... the Grey Ghost, a trawler whose crew meets with a succession of grisly accidents. ‘I set my good foot on the toe of my hurt foot and pulled the spike out myself.’ James’s teeth are then bashed in, and he loses a large lump of his savings to a dentist. His friend Kelley is bitten by a shark and soon afterwards has an ...”

“... to sunset, gazing at the sun with eyes unmoving, and continue all day long standing first on one foot and then on the other in the glowing sand. Megasthenes states that … there is a tribe of human beings with dogs’ heads, who wear a covering of wild beasts’ skins, whose speech is barking … Ktesias describes a tribe of men called Sciopods ...”

“... of the property speculator, and slowly the local political establishment – ruled in Southwark by John O’Grady and his hand-picked ‘mafia’ of loyal Bermondsey councillors – began to listen to the siren songs of the speculators whose seductive promises of high rate income, ‘planning gain’, and glamorous architectural gigantisme, led them inexorably ...”

“... like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to foot And gazing into the future. But Muldoon, who now begins to identify with Brownlee, imagines cognate figures leading the sort of lives one would expect – drinking rum on a verandah in Brazil, for example. No ...”

“... several of Vidal’s hours here have been spent discussing Montaigne (so he said) with Michael Foot. Sadly, when Vidal showed up on one of Newsnight’s election panels, Jeremy Paxman failed to cut him down to size. In fact, he didn’t even try. Vidal was allowed to preen himself at leisure. Next to him, the two British panellists – Lord Archer and Fay ...”

“... The Reverend Robert Boughton, readers of Gilead will remember, was the best friend of the Reverend John Ames, the narrator of that novel, which is written in the form of a memoir addressed to Ames’s seven-year-old son, Robert, a name given to him by his father in honour of his friend. Both Ames and Boughton are in their late seventies; Ames is the still ...”

“... While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell ...”

“... Lever. Apart from myself, two other victims of Barbara’s midnight spleen are Roy Hattersley and John Silkin. John Silkin, a ‘failure’ at the Department of the Environment, is forgiven in a footnote because of his ‘success’ at the Ministry of Agriculture. Perhaps for once she is too generous. Because of the General ...”

“... may in fact be inky revelations of something fairly robust in the artist’s character. He was a foot-fetishist. The New York poet John Giorno, an old boyfriend of the bewigged one, gave an account several years ago of what his pal liked to do on his nights in. Just to get you in the mood, here’s his account of what he ...”

“... squeamish about dispensing with such footling restrictions, left-of-centre figures such as Cook, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith have been allowed to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney ...”

“... the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four thousand, were among the most productive in the world. In a single nine-hour ...”

“... to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist ...”