“... 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 ...”

“... and ill-at-ease Selznick looks there, a Jew in Georgia; it was the first time he had ever set foot in the South. This was an American epic made by someone ostensibly outside its world. Selznick was uneasy about the story’s aptness to be read as a white parable of the essential goodness of the slave-owning South. The film tries its best to alleviate the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... goodbye, but carries on. In short, this is where you get off, reader; I’ll continue alone, on foot, in the failing light, following the trail as it steadily fades into road-repairs, birdsong, the weather, nirvana, the plot thinning down to a point so refined not even angels could dance on it. Goodbye. And with this tone and image and allusion – the ...”

“... come to suppose that everything can be done by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and Germanic,’ he said. ‘I want it to be light, French, a soufflé.’ This confused us performers and wrecked ...”

“... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...”

“... of the very early Holy Family with a Shepherd; the relationship between the left knee and the left foot of Saint Catharine in the Aldobrandini Madonna of twenty years later is no less puzzling; and thirty years after that there is the awkward collision of Christ’s arm with that of the Pharisee in the late Tribute Money painted for the king of Spain. The ...”

“... describes, and Masters records, problems with his feet: ‘Homeless people get wet, you know. Your foot just fucking ends up mouldy basically.’ Stuart went to jail once for burgling a village post office, once for threatening his own child with a knife in a burning house in an attempt to keep the police away. The book becomes an account of life inside, of ...”

“... behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women ...”

“... view’. The 175-acre site should have opened to the public in spring 2001, but the outbreak of foot and mouth inevitably led to a postponement. The Lee Valley Regional Park was established in 1967, the year I moved to Hackney. We had slightly different agendas. The Park planners wanted to transform areas of neglect and desolation, the very qualities I was ...”

“... refused all precautions. He was stabbed to death in the Senate on the Ides of March, 44 BC, at the foot of Pompey’s statue. Some of the finest officers from his years in Gaul were among those wielding the daggers. Others, not least his chief lieutenant, Mark Antony, remained loyal, and prosecuted a still more vicious civil war against Caesar’s ...”

“... Finally, Ramfis too leaves the country. In Vargas Llosa’s account, Balaguer doesn’t put a foot wrong at any stage of this process, and I was so caught up in the immaculate astuteness of his tactics that I almost forgot he was one of the Goat’s closest accomplices for years. But then this is perhaps where we need to read some of the other dictator ...”

“... hear ‘something like the chink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff’. An extraordinary conversation takes place between the nephew and his friend about the difference between ‘life’ and ‘affairs’ – meaning business affairs. The nephew says he’s not ‘silly about life’, only ‘silly about ...”

“... but too many great men looked back wistfully to the old oligarchy. He was stabbed to death at the foot of Pompey’s statue. Terrified senators stampeded, retreating to their palaces and townhouses, and Rome fell into suspended political animation.Antony had control of Caesar’s will and his treasury and was in a good position to stand firm against the ...”