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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... emphasised by its relation to that of the Psalmist: ‘I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot and the ducats in her coffin!’ Like Othello a stranger in Venice, he has to speak a nobler language than its natives. Anti-semitism has always had ample ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... might actually have come to something. The dead titles and the posthumous publications – dreary, foot-slogging reads and ever-diminishing rehashes of Under the Volcano, novelising the novelist who wrote it, ‘six authors in search of a character’, he said – are articles of faith. Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 to a Liverpool cottonbroker, the ...”