“... 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 ...”

“... sort of funny entertainment’. Rock’n’roll as modern vaudeville: I doubt the precious George Michael would agree. On the cover of I was a teenage Sex Pistol Matlock peeps cagily over his shades at you; Bare has George in one of his standard-issue moody pouts. I take it the title connotes the craven exposure of the most secret soul: risky – this risibly ...”

“... does not go out of his way to stimulate such a positive response – not in The Life and Times of Michael K, anyway. Michael K was born with a hare lip, ‘curved like a snail’s foot while the left nostril gaped’, so that his mother ‘shivered to think what had been growing in her ...”

“... spirals through the oyster glow/ Of dawn dope and fog in LA’s/Bel Air, punted perfectly. The foot/That punted it is absolutely stoned.’ The poems in These Days, published in 1989, are more assuredly exhibitionist (‘My penis/Rises, hearing its name, like a dog.//I ought to cut it off/And feed it to itself’), but it is with 1993’s My Tokyo that ...”

“... even look like a map. A series of itineraries stitched together in a roll 22 feet long but only a foot wide, it not only muddles the cardinal directions, but compresses north-south distances while elongating east-west like a funhouse mirror. It shows us routes (and sometimes distances) from point to point, and it illustrates Rome’s sense of its ...”

“... perhaps themselves descended from Cayuga Indians. It seems as though the boot is on the other foot, that the high have been made low, and that Kubla Khan’s ‘pleasure-dome’ has become some top-security hush-hush installation. The narrative of ‘Madoc’ proceeds from the interrogation of South, in best Sci-Fi manner: ‘And, though one of his ...”

“... how the names should be grouped by a principle of ‘meaningful adjacency’. As best he could, Michael Arad listed the names near or next to those with whom they had some sort of living affiliation. The memorial genre that includes trees, pools and waterfalls arouses expectations of an enforced absorption, an unignorable demand that one register the ...”

“... The Handsworth neighbourhood of Birmingham was once home to two 100-foot-long swimming pools, designed for use by the city’s working class. Their size – ‘somewhat unusual for an establishment constructed some fifty years ago’, as a 1951 report put it – earned ‘the gratitude of all swimmers’. The Grove Lane Baths closed in 1985, but are recreated in paintings by Hurvin Anderson, recently on display at Tate Britain ...”

“... impact on society (it is from the essays in his honour, War and Society, 1970, edited by M.R.D. Foot, that the remark by Denys Hay is taken), and in 1969 Angus Calder published The People’s War. In the meantime, Michael Howard and Brian Bond, at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, widened the ...”

“... that is) has turned into tenners. What a triumph for supply-side economics! The trouble, as Michael Jenkin tells us, is that there have not been enough Steve Buxtons hovering over the rigs in the North Sea. And in the absence of a sufficient number of home-grown entrepreneurs, ministers and civil servants have felt obliged to see if they could force a ...”

“... the limited wars which once claimed only a small percentage of the budget. In the Defence Yearbook Michael Clarke repeats what everyone knows: although ‘the Army, in particular, may lament the fact that Bosnia – like the Northern Ireland commitment – detracts from the real business of training for a major war, the fact is that the prospect of major war ...”

“... was named is not dead at all: he was secretly adopted by a childless rich couple and rechristened Michael Abyad; now a doctor, he lives in America and makes occasional visits to Beirut and the Palestinian Centre for Research. A few days after hearing the story Anton sees a magazine picture of a man standing by a bicycle, looking at bodies in the aftermath of ...”

“... before his donkey collapses in the heat while merchandise scatters from the cart. He sets off on foot in the direction of Calvinia, where his relatives live. Naoksa will accompany him, fully convinced that he is taking her back to the home from which she was abducted under gory circumstances by a Boer commando. As usual, neither of them understands a word ...”

“... opens on the rails, the first notes on the piano setting the wheels in motion, the singer with one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train as it pulls out within the room. It’s the summer of 1967, in the basement of Big Pink, a couple of months into fooling with old tunes, moving across a common landscape, new ...”

“... orders. Oñate also ordered all the men from Acoma and the surrounding pueblos have their right foot cut off; 24 men are reported to have been mutilated. This is why, in 1997, unknown protesters with good metalworking skills cut the right foot off the bronze statue and sent a picture of it to the state’s main ...”