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“... late cold spell brought frost, and frost was the bane of labourers who had to break through the foot or so of frozen ground to excavate the foundation and prevent frost heave before sinking elm piles and filling the shallow trenches with limestone and pebbles for drainage. It was also the enemy of the bricklayers who then took over, constructing out of ...”

“... A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any book by any poet in the past couple of years. The praise is disturbing, sometimes wrongheaded, and reflects a category mistake; it also makes a good excuse to look back at the spiky virtues of ...”

“... after the league shut down in March. Fans and players retreated to their homes and watched Michael Jordan instead. The basketball podcasts I listen to paused their endless speculation about the shutdown and the possible resumption of play (later that summer, the league finished the season in a bubble at Disney World in Florida) and gave in to nostalgia ...”

“... a sea horse, for sea horses are beady-eyed little creatures, characteristically alert and erect. Michael Ondaatje’s prose is inventively figurative, but his figures do not always quite add up. A man sets off across the desert on foot, seventy miles to the next oasis: ‘water in a skin bag he had filled from the ain hung ...”

“... pull of an old rival’s frosty challenge and puts on a blindfold before he attempts to sink a 12-foot putt. The novelist’s method has its drawbacks. The brief chapters that look at golf’s lighter side have the feel of after-dinner anecdotes: the plotting is thin and secondary characters are ciphers. The prose can be awkward. Roadmap has a talent for ...”

“... his bulging eyes, exotic garb and outsized aura, which encouraged his admirers to think he was six foot two (not, as he really was, five foot eight). The turn-of-the-century cult of the guru was only possible because it had become so much easier to meet them in the flesh. The many Americans – including Farmer – who ...”

“... the dock as criminal defendants Mr Crossman’s literary executors – among them his widow and Mr Michael Foot – and the editor of the Sunday Times. An order restraining publication could be issued with so much less inconvenience: by a judge alone, without a jury, and without the machinery of the criminal law. The Lord Chief Justice decided not to stop ...”

“... is not quite the same as closing the account. His novel is a tour de force: it scarcely puts a foot wrong, evokes people and places with a wonderfully shrewd, unloving eye. Parent doesn’t spare himself, or paint himself as less vain and selfish and enclosed then he is. But then we are left with that feeling which is sometimes generated by the good ...”

“... along with the body beneath it, was trampled underfoot. Chambort ‘packed the wood down with his foot’ and ‘danced precariously’ atop the pile ... Young Campot also danced about and raised his arms while shouting ‘Vive I’Empéreur!’ ... [The] men displayed a ‘fierce joy’, and those closest to the fire fanned the flames. The execution had ...”

“... Robb cites the memoirs of a Limousin stonemason, Martin Nadaud, who, after travelling miles on foot shouting out the songs of his pays, reached Paris in a wicker basket slung under the body of a tiny coach, the Orléans coucou. Then there was the huge animal population, domestic and wild, to which Robb devotes a haunting chapter evoking marmots, Pyrenean ...”

“... we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats.’ If Tom Frayn had had his way, his son, Michael, would have joined this company of enthusiasts or, better still, have opened the batting for England at the Oval. Many hours were spent on back-garden coaching but the boy proved a serious disappointment. Looking back, seven decades later, he blames the ...”

“... wasn’t a member but belonged on what we used to call ‘our periphery’) there was Paul Foot, a masterly orator who specialised in the ridiculing of Labourism and the exposure of crooks and fascists. Then Alasdair MacIntyre, free at the time of supernatural baggage, who could tell Kautsky from Korsch. ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination. Michael Collie, the more severe of Borrow’s new biographers, notes the instructions Borrow’s publisher gave him when he was writing The Bible in Spain: he was told to report his remarkable achievements, experiences and skills ‘in a natural manner, as if ...”

“... in the catalogue: it shows three deformed feet labelled as belonging to Oedipus (of the swollen foot), Byron (with his club foot) and ‘Bootsy’ (a family friend, and Antigone’s godfather, nicknamed for the special orthopaedic shoe he wore). Shortly before she left the Slade, Dean too started limping: the first sign ...”