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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... match?’) and have to do a balance test: ‘walking forward with the heel touching the toe of the foot behind at each step’. They’re usually back playing within a few minutes.Nowinski likens permitting injured players to return to the field to giving a drunk the keys to his car because he insists he’s safe to drive, and Peters gives several examples of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road. Whether on foot, on my bike or in a car, I engage in a lot of hand gestures – mostly meaning ‘wait!’ or ‘go ahead!’ – when I’m out and about, and look for others’ signals. San Francisco Airport has signs telling people to make eye contact before they cross ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”

“... Bolt Court, now long since demolished. The actual figures are unconvincing. Johnson stands at the foot of the front steps, a corpulent figure with a walking stick; both his pose and his costume echo a popular engraving showing him ‘in his travelling dress’, published by Thomas Trotter in 1786. Barber stands at the top of the steps, framed in the ...”

“... humour, neither of them from the narrator’s point of view. The image of the acrobats is from Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, and isn’t, on its first mention in that book, a dream: ‘The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling from each other’s ...”

“... a lock-in after hours, and we’re not home till three that morning. The phone goes early. It’s Michael Keohane, ringing from Sligo, where he’s president of the Yeats Society. We talk, more about the Middle East than Yeats, and he invites us to the opening of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo that Sunday, and to the party afterwards in Lissadell ...”

“... worker militancy. Outside the US, as the Cold War raged, management consultants were willing foot soldiers in the global battle for capitalism. A 1960 report by the New York Times exalted the US firms that were ‘aggressively’ packaging and marketing management advice on ‘whatever their specialities – dams, textiles, or general management ...”

“... good one – about 40,000 pounds more a year.’ The Langhornes were a loyal clan (Nancy’s son Michael Astor called his memoirs Tribal Feeling), so it’s not surprising that Nancy was always giving money to her poorer sisters and buying them houses, nor that she financed her eldest child throughout his life. Bobbie was chucked out of the Army for being ...”

“... of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the North, the two languages, the available rhetorics. I have been reading The Crane Bag in association with Hugh Kenner’s new book, A ...”

“... and any loss is more than made up for by Paul Hammond’s splendid notes, easy to read at the foot of the same page, and full of the most fascinating matter. Absalom and Achitophel is a storehouse of social and political history; and this text enables us to learn or to recall it without effort, to enjoy simultaneously the vigorous couplets of the satiric ...”