“... him. In the reminiscences of his friends, he figured as absent-minded, cuddly (he was only five foot – podgy, bespectacled), shy, impractical, lovable. The story of his ‘Unfinished’ symphony came to symbolise the tragedy of his unfinished life (he wrote two movements and put them in a drawer, later giving the manuscript to his friend Josef ...”

“... does – a little invisible bird fluttering off – when you die. I had the cab let me off at the foot of the block. I wanted to slow things down a bit, take in the neighbourhood. It had been a few years. There were some new, outsize homes built over two lots and extending out to the sidewalk: Graeco-Roman fortresses, my father called them. But it was the ...”

“... years without carving in an Africanesque mode before returning to the fold to fashion the ten-foot-high King of Kings (c.1938, now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York) with no self-consciousness, it seems, quite possibly sculpting to jazz, since he’d built up a first-rate record collection, mainly of blacks (including Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher ...”

“... inaugural dissertation, ‘Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Aesthetischen’, was sponsored by Paul Tillich and won him his professorship at Frankfurt in 1931. Although he was removed from his post soon after the Nazi seizure of power, he continued to publish articles and reviews – not all of them above reproach – in German periodicals. Towards the end ...”

“... private school accent (he and my grandfather were born and brought up in London, and went to St Paul’s) Robin describes the events of a May night and morning near the plantation where he was assistant manager in Kodanad, high in the mountains in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. The previous night a leopard had killed a bullock belonging to one of the ...”

“... about to take over the known world. Until a month ago, the United States seemed unable to put a foot wrong. Then it, too, showed ominous signs of faltering. Can Japan’s mysterious ailment, whatever it is, be spreading? Japan came third last in the OECD’s table of industrialised and would-be industrialised member nations’ growth for 1999, with 0.2 per ...”

“... labelled himself. But he could have escaped the legend to which he had devoted such energies. As Paul Ferris’s excellent biography established some time back, while Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder. He wasn’t martyred by the barbarians of the Inland Revenue: by the time he died Thomas was on the verge of being ...”

“... the dark towers of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. In the year the Revolution began, this area was known as the Cordeliers district, taking its ...”

“... systems in northwest Europe by forcing them to lodge their claims in the country they first set foot in.The fourth and fifth categories relate to the harm that borders do on the largest scale. By stopping people from poorer countries moving to richer ones, Jones argues, borders perpetuate global inequality, and by turning natural resources into private ...”

“... amputation’.)Silence follows war and the appelés were accustomed to it well before they set foot in Algeria. Born between the mid-1930s and the early 1940s, they grew up in the shadow of economic crisis, two world wars and the German occupation. Many had fathers and grandfathers who had fought in the trenches or in the Resistance. Although the French ...”

“... that he can walk on water, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for shooting himself in the foot. And in marrying Lady Diana Spencer, he thought he had chosen the ideal bride, yet it turned out that he had made the most terrible mistake of his life. The most important thing that a Prince of Wales has to do is to choose the right wife. Neither George IV ...”

“... and Handel. Tyers commissioned a statue of Handel in informal pose – a slipper falling from his foot, lyre in hand – as the Gardens’ centrepiece and presiding spirit (there is much about the Englishing of Handel in Brewer’s study). The Gardens’ pavilions and supper boxes were hung with contemporary English paintings, especially by Francis Hayman. In ...”

“... when we realise that the delegated author of the four late novels – Gary’s mysterious cousin Paul Pavlowitch – began to act independently of his manipulator: eventually Gary had to ask him to bow out of the competition for a further Prix Goncourt, when he had already violated their agreement by giving his photograph to the press. This unexpected ...”

“... the casinos.     Magritte invites him in, steps back to let him pass and, the moment he sets foot in the drawingroom, gives him a tremendous kick up the backside. The astounded visitor hesitates between the multitude of reactions that come to mind, and in the end sits down as if nothing had happened on the chair which Magritte, as if nothing had ...”

“... circles, mixing with Mallarmé, Alphonse Daudet, André Gide and Rodin, Renard only ever had one foot in Paris, and in 1904, following after his father, he was elected mayor of Chitry. His roots, he was always eager to stress, were ‘still covered in earth’. Missing in the photographs is his hair colour. In 1896, crushing heavily on Sarah Bernhardt (she ...”