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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who did not intend or desire or expect that to be the result’. Laura Mitchell and her boyfriend, Michael Hall, stopped for a drink at the King’s Head in Buttershaw, Bradford on a Saturday night out in 2007. At about 2 a.m. they and some friends left the pub and got into a taxi outside. The taxi turned out to have been booked by someone else and a fight ...”

“... his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided London in ...”

“... it is unforgivably coarse: in what it does to Rilke (‘The dark was heavier than Caesar’s foot’), to the Matratzengruft, the mattress-grave of the dying Heine (‘my dear German public is goosestepping home, yawning’), to a nandrolone Baudelaire, unaccountably admired by Eliot: ‘Among the vermin, jackals, panthers, lice,/gorillas and tarantulas ...”

“... press has a variegated record on miscarriages of justice. At its best it has journalists like Paul Foot who have doggedly reinvestigated cases nobody else would listen to. At its worst the press can be a source of prejudice that, as the case of the Taylor sisters powerfully demonstrates, actually promotes miscarriages of justice. Between these poles its ...”

“... recognition enacted by both the audience and the characters in the fiction: Oedipus means ‘swell-foot’, but the sense ‘know-foot’ hidden in his name becomes painfully audible towards the end of his story. Ajax hears the resemblance between his name and ‘aiai’, a cry of agony, in Sophocles’ tragedy about his ...”

“... previous trip) and the registration number of my car (nobody penetrates the security barriers on foot), and looked forward to my Friday afternoon appointment at Gate 1A. It had taken weeks to set this up, but I wasn’t surprised when, a couple of hours before I set off for the Blackwall Tunnel, the tour of inspection was cancelled. Deferred ...”

“... a word Buckoke likes, and which now evokes the last major Ethiopian famine, as covered by Michael Buerk, rather than the plagues visited on Egypt in the Book of Exodus. Harden puts a brave face on things, but the litany of woes dulls the edge of his cheery manner. Candid reporting from Africa is apt to be bleak. Buckoke is a pessimist by instinct, but ...”

“... Higgins twitches and gets cramps Whenever from his headlong rush deflected. I’d like to keep a foot in both these camps, Believing the two styles, deep down, connected. They fight it to a finish frame by frame And no one doubts it’s more than just a game. Higgins has won and as the fuss subsides We realise that a game is all it is: A fish-tank show of ...”

“... black-coated, you plod out stubbornly as if in lockstep to grasp your blank not-I at the foot of the tunnel … as if asleep, Child Randall, greeting the car, and approving – your harsh luminosity. It was never decisively established whether or not he intended to commit suicide, but the coroner decided it was an accident. While the premature ...”