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“... call the Kiir. More joined the exodus, until something like 100,000 people were moving south on foot. In Abyei, tanks were parked on the roads, homes set alight, possessions stolen, and the UN compound, which was the town’s most prominent feature, was hit by mortars, its helicopters fired on and its food warehouses looted. The bridge across the Kiir was ...”

“... to enter his enclosure, and slides around in his own darkness. Exactly 146 interviews later, John le Carré, our premier narrative spook-meister, exhibits, by his own admission, that knack whereby the memory fails and the lie takes over. There is something in his tone that advises us not to believe him too much. The interview took place in 1997, more ...”

“... too easily the spectres of lost children and absent parents. Tacita Dean’s Found Fortress is a foot-wide piece of black and white embroidery, bought at a flea market in France, that shows a medieval, or mock-medieval, crenellated structure, with a tiny figure on horseback in the foreground. Dean has reversed the fragment so that it looks like a ...”

“... to metropolitan notice through a sensational murder case involving two of his maternal uncles: Sir John Dineley-Goodere, who was the victim; and his younger brother Captain Samuel Goodere (after whom Foote was named), who was executed for the murder. The back story was a saga of legal wrangling over some hugely valuable estates so wrapped around with ...”

“... of the expedition’s other climbers were British, as was its finance, and its leader, Colonel John Hunt (now Baron Hunt of Lanfair Waterdine and a Knight of the Garter) was on secondment from the British Army. On descending, Ed Hillary, as he is universally known, shouted to his fellow New Zealander George Lowe, another climber of great ...”

“... Marian frame – as an illustration of a popular story from the Apocrypha, which has the infant John the Baptist, in flight from Herod’s executioners, come across Christ on his flight into Egypt. Though never was Egypt like this. Maybe the trigger for the temple of boulders was a line from the Song of Songs: ‘My dove in the clefts of rocks (in ...”

“... the footnote he appended, in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, to a passage in King John about shoes: – – – slippers, (which his nimble hasteHad falsely thrust upon contrary feet,) I know not how the commentators understand this important passage, which in Dr Warburton’s edition is marked as eminently beautiful, and, on the whole, not ...”

“... felicitousness, when consciousness slots into alignment with the feel of uneven stone under the foot, or the taste of a special flavour on the tongue. Imbued with the whole theatre of the French metaphysical tradition, Proust must have seen at once that this idea could not only be worked up into an impressive intellectual and imaginative thesis, but that it ...”

“... look as if she had committed the crime. This would have involved Julie Bamber overpowering her six-foot-plus working-farmer father in a hand-to-hand struggle, as well as shooting her two children as they slept. The Essex Police’s willingness to believe that owed as much to stock ideas about women (in this case, deranged, ‘hysterical’ women) as did the ...”

“... its 3000 lbs to 26 batteries, arranged in a clumsy T-frame ‘tunnel’ which sticks up by about a foot between the two passengers – who can scarcely squeeze into what internal space is left. As for luggage, forget it. At current pump prices, US gasoline is cheaper than bottled water. And, relative to the energy it produces, gasoline is light in weight (8 ...”

“... eaters’, then we know that they were operating in a peculiar frame of reference. Before they set foot in the Soviet Union, the killers were looking through the lens of an extreme anti-semitism. Without this lens, they may not have resisted killing, but they might have left on record some hint of surprise or doubt, some indication that they had asked ...”

“... this stretch of Telford’s new road, running between high rock walls on one side and a ninety-foot drop on the other, had itself come to seem a ‘narrow and dangerous track’. The bends that Telford had tamed and made ‘acceptable for stagecoach travel’ were now much too tight for fast motor traffic. The Glyn Bends were closed to vehicular traffic in ...”

“... conviction that it would all be over soon. Almost inquisitively, I tried to move – my arm, my foot, my fingers. Remotely, under a kind of numbness, I could sense the energy I was exerting, but there was no movement. Again, I could hear, but I couldn’t see. My sons were with me (we had planned to watch a DVD) and I tried to summon up the power to speak ...”

“... that you had gone.’ He can’t write enough poetry to make anyone happy. To the publisher John Rodker, who wants to issue a volume of new poems, he confesses sheepishly: ‘I am sorry for the misunderstanding. I don’t think there is enough new stuff for more than 25 pages, but perhaps I shall have more by the end of June. I hope so.’ Elementary ...”

“... I discover, admitted to his French translator that he had never spent much time in Shropshire), John Clare, A.A. Milne, Shelley, Blake, Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and – thanks to Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s Rattle Bag, and Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology Unrespectable Verse – a swarm of lesser-known poets.Among these has been Charles ...”