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“... yet been on a route march, or done fire piquet, or done a guard. The reason for all this is my bad foot. But I can’t expect to spend the duration writing poetry and reading Gibbon. The prisoners cocked snooks at me, made ugly faces, giggled, implored me to lend them money, and in fact behaved like a lot of naughty children seven years old. One man was ...”

“... then of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, himself once the tallest schoolboy in Britain at six foot seven, he must, to his son, have seemed like Oceanus or something; an altogether more convincing mastery of the world than most fathers. Sending his son (both sons) to Eton was a bridge to home, a social leap, but also, the son feels, a kind of betrayal, as ...”

“... reminded of Balzac’s story ‘Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu’, in which a perfectly, executed foot alone survived the mad, obsessive onslaught of paint. Art critics contrive to say fairly solemn things about the much reduced Large Staff Room (the expanse of colour suggests ‘a kind of mind space in which the memory – a knee under a table ...”

“... cue like a club. If you are right-handed, the right leg will take the strain as you bend. The left foot should point in the direction of your shot. Keeping as low as possible reduces the possibility of movement. The cue arm should glide freely back and forth, rather like a pendulum, but only the forearm should move; the bridge-hand is spread rigid on the cloth ...”

“... of Rubruck, who travelled to China and India, attributed tales of a people who have only one foot, which they use as a sunshade, to the fact that all Indians carried umbrellas. The alternative tendency has been not to explain away medieval beliefs but to exaggerate their outlandishness and the credulity of those who held them. Some of the most ...”

“... I don’t think they flow from his religious commitment. In giving his own interpretation of John Paul II’s encyclical ‘Faith and Reason’, MacIntyre says: It is characteristic of human beings that, whatever our culture, we desire to know and to understand, that we cannot but set ourselves the achievement of truth as a goal. And among the truths to ...”

“... Basset, characterised by Bertie Wooster as ‘one of those soppy girls riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds that the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case. She’s a drooper.’ I cannot imagine ...”

“... occasionally to be seen: reproductions on board of work by modern British painters – Ravilious, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Pasmore. These, I think, were put out by Shell and turn up occasionally nowadays at auction, though not quite at Sotheby’s. That I’ve always liked – and found no effort in liking – British paintings of the Forties and Fifties I ...”

“... of imperial oppression, the icy giant of the North. ‘Naturally I despise my country from head to foot,’ wrote Pushkin, ‘but I am not going to let a foreigner get away with sharing that feeling.’ Here is how a Russian writes a poem about his own tyranny, he seems to say. ‘It was the best of times; it was the worst of times’: Pushkin’s poem ...”

“... to an invisible art manifestation: Lost Memories by Emma Matthews. ‘Very elegant, very Paul Klee,’ the punters say. Rusting English metal, from somewhere down the A13, near Rainham Marshes, rendered as a grid of delicately balanced reds and pinks, with just enough green to cancel the headache. This, so often, is how it works; synergy, they call ...”

“... the most telling disposition of his props:  I am suddenly standing, in a dressing-gown, at the foot of my bed in my apartment in the Ecole Normale. The light of a grey November day – it was Sunday the 16th, around nine in the morning – came from the left, from the very tall window, framed for a very long time past by some very old red Empire curtains ...”

“... Mary Magdalene plays in the story of salvation is after the crucifixion, when she stands at the foot of the cross with the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist, and then goes to the tomb with embalming oils to care for Jesus’s body. In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke there are several women involved, and they find the tomb empty except for an angel ...”

“... or lawyerly approach to political philosophy, ticking off useful concepts and ignoring the rest. Paul Johnson (perhaps not the most reliable witness) described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship ...”

“... so he informs us, by Geo. ‘On all the islands I’d visited, I’d watched fishermen push out 14-foot home-built skiffs through the surf and come back with tuna as big as aero engines, looking complacently silvery and riveted. That enterprise struck me as dangerous; at sea the boats were no bigger than walnut shells and everywhere I looked I saw ...”

“... 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 ...”