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“... for instance the perspectival and proportional awkwardness of the soldier’s position, his right foot being too near the female alms-giver’s heel – though these are features for which Michael Fried has found an unexpected justification, as being part of a scheme to unsettle the conventional relationship of viewer to ...”

“... who had sacrificed their lives ‘in response to the call of their King and Country’. At six foot four, Wilson was an imposing figure. In 1886, on imperial service in Burma, he was attacked by local bandits, hostile to colonial rule, with a long, sharp knife used for cutting bamboo. The wound left a permanent scar over his right eye which caused his face ...”

“... are near extinction. Further afield, the few dozen remaining California Condors, with their ten-foot wingspan, continue to hover at the brink of disappearance; after an ingenious captive-breeding programme, a few have been reintroduced in the wild, where they show an unfortunate penchant for flying into powerlines and eating the lead shot in game killed by ...”

“... And even the best of our teachers could be seen gripping the floor strenuously with the supporting foot, which seemed to me to be cheating. The next and final phase in this unwitting crash-course in the history of modern dance technique was Release, which emerged from the experiments in natural movement made by dancers who rebelled (from Cunningham mostly) in ...”

“... it seems they will kill him so as to deny the regime an asset. A 12-year-old girl with a wounded foot and an ulcerated mouth guards Mallory, armed with a rusty Lee Enfield that is to figure talismanically throughout the subsequent story. Mallory tries to escape, and the girl pulls the trigger. At this point it is plausible to assume an Incident-at-Owl-Creek ...”

“... story, no drug and a lot of pain. When the hero tries to escape, nurse Wilkes chops off his left foot with an axe and cauterises the wound with a propane torch. A lesser offence results in a thumb being sliced off with an electric meat knife. Kings handles such scenes with infectious glee: Paul screamed as fire splashed over the raw and bleeding ...”

“... to thank him, and added a handwritten note in blue ink: ‘I was really impressed and have told Michael Gove about your work. Keep it up!’ Less than two years later, police went to the school and arrested Raza. On 6 March this year, he was charged with nine counts of fraud in relation to the school’s finances: three offences of fraud by abuse of ...”

“... metres. The logging companies always insisted that they took only the largest trunks. But a four-foot-thick, hundred-foot-tall tree could not be neatly extracted like a tooth. The procedure was closer to a punch in the mouth: for every log that was dragged out of the jungle as many as ten smaller ones were destroyed by its ...”

“... sugared sonnets among his private friends. Lessing’s Shakespeare half-sits on his plinth, one foot off the ground, looking quizzically to one side as if making a proposition to an invisible someone a little further along the path: in one hand he holds a small scroll (a love poem?) while the other, resting between his thighs, toys with a rose. This is a ...”

“... a caesura that does not fall pat and undemanding, never before or after the caesura a reversed foot, no interplay that isn’t rudimentary between vowel and consonant, no memorable cadence, no justification but metrical exigency for ‘sharped’ rather than ‘sharpened’. If this is ‘the best Victorian verse’, it is verse that disregards Wyatt and ...”

“... country by which Lewis and Clark were about to be misled was the statement that the journey by foot took only five days from the headwaters of the eastwards-flowing Missouri River to those of the Columbia, which ran to the Pacific. What Pratz was saying, in other words, was that the continent was navigable from east to west, apart from a brief portage, and ...”

“... therefore became, so to speak, theatrical squared. Their situation also made them competitive. As Michael Young was to point out in The Rise of the Meritocracy, élites based on education lack the security of the old aristocracies of land and money. To live by one’s wits is a nervous business: every younger brain, each new ...”

“... jungle is rich with bright red pitcher plants and among the clear glades of vast trees, easy under foot, you can hear the high notes of a gibbon or see a startled deer. Twenty years later in Irian Jaya at the far end of Indonesia, the river was far from the village and bathing was rare. The moss forest was cramped, cold and difficult. There were no ...”

“... knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black leather, chrome, complimentary coffee. Film, television, advertising. Bikers with ...”

“... No American writer​ ever revealed more in a photograph than Joan Didion. She was small, five foot one and three-quarter inches tall, which she fudged on her California driver’s licence as five two. She weighed nothing. Somewhere there must be a photograph of her beaming with delight but I’ve never seen it. With age, her neck thinned ...”