“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... decade of settlement, with Collins dead, opinions and divisions hardened. The one-time highwayman Michael Howe, who called himself the ‘lieutenant governor of the woods’, had carved out a fiefdom through his control of access to the grasslands, in covert league with leading men in the colony and with a tough squad of convict bushmen to back him. He also ...”

“... again.‘Oh. My. God – yes!’ my neighbour offered. I know she was real because she stood on my foot and I stubbornly trust the link between cause and effect.Like birds in Narnia, pairs of quote-marks came flapping into view. The huge speakers vibrated with ‘life’, then Whitney ‘came on’ wearing – or ‘wearing’ – a gold glittery dress and, in ...”

“... latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.’ The place is specific the familiar Hardy country; the time is almost as closely defined; the people are archetypal man, woman, child. The man’s name is withheld until the morning of terrible sobriety after he realises that he has sold his wife at the ...”

“... up years ago – and because of it too: the pace of change has picked up since then. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sometimes talks about the importance of tourism to New York as if tourists were more important to the city than its inhabitants, but when you consider that 44 million tourists visited the city last year – an increase of 25 per cent since 2001 ...”

“... way, chased it and kicked it five metres the other, then struck it emphatically into the goal, my foot at shoulder height. There was no net so it dribbled sadly into the distance. I’d never scored before and wheeled away in triumph before I noticed that no one else was celebrating. I had scored the most egregious of own goals. You’re Black, you’re a ...”

“... castle on the private island of Brecqhou (as did Tony Blair and David Cameron), and on their 197-foot yacht, the Lady Beatrice. Not long after her death, a bronze bust of Thatcher was installed in the Ritz’s lobby.By then the brothers had been in the hotel business for half a century. Born within ten minutes of each other in 1934, they grew up in a family ...”