“... 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 ...”

“... province, Shandong. Families pay a fortune for property in coveted school districts. A 550-square-foot flat costs more than a million dollars in some parts of Beijing – more, the authors note, than an equivalent home in Palo Alto. Lower-income households devote almost two-thirds of their earnings to education; the authors call it ‘a tax on China’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... took sixty years ago of the ‘School of London’ and Colony Room members Freud, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach together at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho. Paul wanted to conjure the power of that boys’ gang and express her own uneasy position vis-à-vis this now auratic company. ‘I belong among them,’ she asserts, ‘even if they ...”

“... likely to put modern readers in mind of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other pop stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna.’ Yes, precisely. From the outset Liszt is characterised as a celeb whose life was bounded by the 19th-century equivalents of the private jet, the billion dollar yacht and the bevy of air-brained blondes. It’s true that there was a ...”

“... know his party better’. Other senior Tories whom she also despised, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were summoned back into the fold as cover for her inability to devise a winning Brexit strategy. But Osborne, never. He didn’t stand in the 2017 general election. The dilemma May faced was how to square the circle Brexit had conjured up: on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... so he seemed for had looked occurred for a public of Leonard glory distinction’: that’s Michael Klauke’s rearrangement of words from an English translation of Balzac’s Sarrasine. The Bible (alphabetised) by Rory Macbeth is either a concrete poem or an exercise in self-hypnosis. One page (of the eight printed here) begins with nine rows (135 ...”

“... were watched by French intelligence and why the Portuguese refused absolutely to let him set foot in Guinea. While these letters are free of anti-colonial rhetoric, there’s never any doubt which side he’s on. He couldn’t bear the colonial assumptions of the other African authority of the day, Margery Perham. ‘I’ve now finished Margery Perham on ...”

“... 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 ...”