“... community in order to keep interest rates down. About the same time he shot himself in the foot, metaphorically, by becoming entangled in a complicated case involving the KGB and a former Labor Party official, but the judicial inquiry that has followed seems likely to exonerate the Prime Minister, if not the Australian Intelligence services. A ...”

“... street, to meet in lakes that form in any flat space. Parts of the main square are more than a foot deep in water. Cars set up washes so strong that the battered taxis stall – their drivers, sometimes in army uniform or straight from teaching or the office, can’t possibly afford to keep them in good repair. The new rich quarters to the south and ...”

“... bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? . . . The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!’ Walter Benjamin thought a philosophy that couldn’t account for fortune-telling by means of coffee grounds couldn’t be a real ...”

“... and inside it a carmine, black-tailed cock (taking the place of the missing dog), chained by the foot, apparently to correct its insolent and aggressive manner.This is the point: the lyrical – but selfless and unselfconscious – stopping of ...”

“... the weather been hazier, more care might have been taken and the collision avoided. In that case, Michael Davie suggests, it’s likely that no one would ever have known how close to disaster they’d been: ‘not all near-misses by aircraft are reported now; and the Ice Patrol wonder how many near-collisions by ships were reported then.’ At the inquiries ...”

“... the year that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony in the west of the city. Five foot two, green-eyed, a self-described ‘gypsy-spirited tyrannical pirate’ with a face that was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage ...”

“... daughters were better organised than their brothers, a forthright pronouncement that caused more foot shuffling. For Ahmad, as for the vast majority of locals, these are tough years. Business is going badly. He has more time than he really wants to devote to his directorship of the local football team, Malang United Soccer. He’s attempting to organise the ...”

“... evidence for survival was and is remarkably various. One example is the Cerne Abbas Giant, the 180-foot chalk figure with a thirty-foot erect phallus, dug deep into the chalk at what must have been an impressive cost in man-hours. A quarter of a mile away there lay, until the Reformation, one of the largest and richest ...”

“... Jennings, who died two years ago, wrote too many poems. She was careless about her output, sending Michael Schmidt, her editor at Carcanet, ‘sacks’ of manuscript work to sift through and make into a collection. Even he seems occasionally to have lost track. His sympathetic and shrewd introduction records that her own favourite among her poems was ...”

“... the reader down so many interesting byways. In June 1951, Channon reports from the Commons that ‘Michael Foot, a real horror of the French Revolution type, made a vindictive, violent speech about Northern Ireland.’ It proves, on reading it in Hansard, to be an excellent speech criticising the treatment of Ulster Catholics as second-class ...”

“... Knightsbridge to be Oxford Street. Of the exhibition I recall only the two huge blackamoors at the foot of the staircase in the entrance and the music that was playing throughout (the notion of music in an exhibition then thought quite daring), though I remember, too, coveting some of the portraits and drawings of the Diaghilev troupe and finding the wild ...”

“... from the records – a most extreme example … In these mixed and extraordinary studies, with one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot treading a path for modern science, Newton spent the first phase of his life … in Trinity when he did all his real work. Strachey found something of the same attraction in Newton’s ...”

“... early decades of this century, some Africans financed their pilgrimage by selling their children. Michael Wolfe’s The Hadj is the story of an American convert’s pilgrimage made in 1990. Wolfe, who also writes novels, conscientiously avoids the politics of the contemporary hajj and his responses seem curiously muted. He enjoyed many encounters with his ...”

“... books returned to the shelves). Beddoes would have been relieved to know that Judith Higgens and Michael Bradshaw have included none of The Improvisatore in their new and revised selection of his poetry. From The Brides’ Tragedy we get only highlights, but enough to see Beddoes’s developing skill as a poet. The intensity of his imagery and the often ...”

“... in a Ferrari, and he’s an inch taller than me. Enzo Ferrari himself was well over six foot.) I ducked down and settled in. The instructor in the passenger seat, also wearing a helmet, shook my hand and introduced himself as Paolo.He talked me through the controls: keep your left foot well away from the ...”