“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anyone willing to accept his apology.After the disturbances in the Toxteth neighbourhood in 1981, Michael Heseltine, then a member of Thatcher’s cabinet, argued that ‘tactical retreat, a combination of economic erosion and encouraged evacuation’, had been going on in Liverpool for decades, and was at least partly the result of government policy. He ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as popular as ever among the common complainers (Fowler’s ‘grammatical parrots’). And even Michael Dummett (Grammar & Style) has come out as being vehemently against splitting, arguing that the ambiguities it sometimes causes show that it is ‘intrinsically unnatural’. Dummett also plays a remarkable German trump instead of the usual Latin joker: it ...”

“... two-year stint in the Farringdon Works he never lost touch with his family or friends, he kept one foot on their ground always, and if he was – as everyone who knew him thought – happy for once, it seems to have been because he was liberated as an observer, able to store up for himself other people’s voices, hobbies (racing pigeons, football), awful ...”

“... peanut butter paste intended for M&M’s; barrels of frozen guava juice for smoothies; a forty-foot tower of Asian shrimp and imitation crab meat; boxes containing bull pizzles, hearts and livers to be transformed into burger meat; and ‘entire lamb carcasses from New Zealand, wrapped in canvas and nestled together nose to tail on the wooden pallet, as if ...”

“... Hailsham considered Conservatism to be ‘not so much a philosophy as an attitude’. Finally, Michael Oakeshott, the leading Conservative philosopher of the 20th century, wrote of ‘the distorting mirror of an ideology’ and identified the main enemy of limited government as ideological politics and state planning. Above all, Oakeshott laid down in his ...”

“... in February 2002, just over a month after the first prisoners arrived there, shackled hand and foot, hooded and blindfolded by blacked-out goggles. Stafford Smith’s description of a hunger strike that began on 6 July 2005, ending briefly only to start again on 11 August, is harrowing. In a parody of medical care, and in violation of the Tokyo prohibition ...”