“... ad, Mamallapuram was probably the greatest seaport in India. On the monsoon winds, great ninety-foot long, three hundred-ton, lash-lugged vessels carried Indian textiles, steel swords and brass buddhas to the furthest corners of south-east Asia – Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia – bringing back on the north-easterly monsoon ...”

“... has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in ...”

“... and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen ...”

“... he planned himself. For months at a time he rode the railways, traversed frozen rivers on foot and holed up in grim hotels. He crossed the Mississippi, the Appalachians and the Atlantic, by steamer to Liverpool. Lancashire became the heartland of his celebrity.Lyceums dictated not just Emerson’s topics ...”

“... drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and ...”

“... place in Vonnegut’s fiction. No reader forgets the brainwashed Use of The Sirens of Titan, foot-soldier in the army of Mars and directed to strangle his best buddy on the parade-ground by a radio receiver in his skull – and there are many other figures in the novels who act under external control in a frightening way, against the grain of their ...”

“... under Ibn Saud, in the Hejaz itself asphalt roads and buses replaced camels and journeying on foot. Pilgrims travelled for many motives: the religious duty to make the haj, providing one could fulfil its conditions, was not ill, had the funds, would not leave one’s family destitute and so forth; trade, local or regional; labour and remittance along the ...”

“... Mickey at story meetings’; until 1946 Disney also voiced him, in falsetto. In another new Life, Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, the studio head is seen by animators acting out ‘how a Chinese turtle should dance’, or doing ‘any of the people in the pictures, valets, anything – he all of a sudden was a valet.’ One such episode was burned in ...”

“... countries? They’d gone to the Germany-Poland border, finding something appealing in setting foot in two countries, and as they walked they played a game they’d apparently played on the way to primary school every morning, of times-table questions they would pass back and forth. (I envied him in this: as the last child, he played many such games with ...”

“... biggest emergency operation, and for the Clinton Administration, the food shortages provide a foot in the door of an unaccommodating Communist country. Concerns that the aid may be going astray have been dismissed by the World Food Programme, which last September claimed – falsely – that ‘food distribution is monitored by international staff to ...”

“... house blocked the release for more than five months. Internal emails paint a picture of continual foot-dragging. One senior Cabinet Office official suggested releasing information in a ‘managed way’, comparing the situation to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. So far, the government has insisted that all is as it should be. In early December, ...”

“... at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s cricket ground and to eclectic neo-vernacular in Jeremy Dixon’s crow-stepped-gabled housing in Docklands. Among the targets for the Prince’s brickbats are London’s Royal Free Hospital, most new building in the City of ...”

“... of the audience seemed to me to put him in the front line of one-man showmen, along with, say, Michael MacLiammoir, Ruth Draper and Noel Coward. Thus no modern writer can have taken more literally the injunction to ‘read out loud the sentence you have just written’ – except that Keillor has spoken not just an individual sentence or two but the whole ...”

“... most ordinary Russians, the fact that the liberal opposition is dominated by people who have one foot in the West is an accepted reality. Yet where the New York Times and the Economist see only courageous truth-tellers defending their compatriots against ever-encroaching despotism, A Terrible Country stands out for being as critical of Russia’s liberal ...”

“... is it starting to build up again, and in drastically altered form. Thus, when a French reader sets foot in a British bookshop, the impact is powerfully bizarre – as he stumbles into a wall of memoirs and recollections. It’s as if the minutest ghost, returned to haunt the literary scene, can enchant the greedy English customer. Let us consider now the ...”