“... countries? They’d gone to the Germany-Poland border, finding something appealing in setting foot in two countries, and as they walked they played a game they’d apparently played on the way to primary school every morning, of times-table questions they would pass back and forth. (I envied him in this: as the last child, he played many such games with ...”

“... manner I almost ever saw,’ she wrote to Thackeray the following day. ‘Mr Clough sat at the foot of my sofa with this keen expression of investigation, which I determined not to mind, & only thought him un-understandable.’ Part of what unnerved Clough’s contemporaries – in his verse as well as in life – was his talent for scissoring through the ...”

“... of the Auvergne château to ground level, where the speed attained threw its cargo up round a ten-foot-high loop. The ‘passengers’, stuck inside a wheeled wooden box, were rabbits and chickens, and the idea was to demonstrate centripetal force; before and after each trip the animals’ eyes were examined to see if the experience had produced greater ...”

“... of being the first in the field. Since he (or rather, his selfless literary executor, Michael Foot) shook off the chains of conventional Cabinet secrecy and got volume one into print, there have been successors. Every minister knew, at the time when all these notebooks and tapes were being compiled round poor old Harold Wilson’s Cabinet table, that ...”

“... of marginal notes on early English printed pages – Bibles, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Nashe, Sir John Harington and so on. She is more pedestrian than McGann, but more convincing. When the sound-stream of language can be represented graphically, symbolic gestures (swearing on the Book) and the use of the text itself as a visual symbol become ...”

“... True it was possible to get out of it by inching slowly forward, on one’s fat brown rump, to the foot; but that, for some reason, often woke both of them ... ’ Syed Omar, we find, is tight-wedged between his sleeping wives – ‘most irregular, uncleanly, contrary to the strict Islamic custom’. Strict Christian custom, likewise, is defied by Kenneth ...”

“... The silhouette of Cesar Augusto Sandino, his hands clasped behind his back, his left foot pointing outwards, wearing high-laced army boots and a ten-gallon hat, is the universal emblem of Nicaragua’s revolutionary movement. In the 1920s Sandino led a prolonged guerrilla campaign against the US marines who had been occupying his country since 1912 ...”

“... a fortitude as ever in the past.’ Only Edgar Evans died a rather commonplace death – at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, of concussion after a fall. ‘He died a natural death,’ was all Scott could manage by way of an epitaph for him in the last message, but then Evans was only a petty officer, not a gentleman like the rest, and had slept on the ...”

“... and six possibilities for the kind of paper on which Jack Kerouac typed out the original hundred-foot scroll of On the Road (teletype paper, Japanese drawing paper, oilskin art paper, shelf-paper, canister-paper, tracing paper). He finds strands of Kerouac’s road romance throughout the Beat legend. Tangled up in the story, as usual, is the Beat ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly ...”

“... The relationship between Byron and his editor John Murray lasted a little over ten years. It began in March 1812 with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which made Byron’s name. (‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ he famously wrote, or is said to have written.) It ended twice: first, in the winter of 1822, when, after a number of disagreements and misunderstandings, Byron transferred his business to the publisher John Hunt; and finally in the spring of 1824, when Murray presided over the destruction of Byron’s memoirs, which he had not read, in his rooms at 50 Albemarle Street ...”

“... unworthy prostitute,I blush for you.The English throne is sullied,vile bastard, by your foot!Some of this, especially the opera as performed with fervid and overwrought passion by Joan Sutherland as Mary and Huguette Tourangeau as Elizabeth and Pavarotti as Leicester, can take me straight back to my youth. The best music for that, however, is by ...”

“... stare – blue-grey, strabismic – dazzles in Colony of Ghosts (2023), painted after a photograph John Deakin 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 ...”

“... he incorporates lyrics from Dizzee Rascal, K-Trap and Frank Ocean, as well as quotations from John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (2018), an essay published by the American Academy of Ophthalmology and a Netflix show about the interior designer Ilse Crawford. His own photographs are interspersed throughout the book. A ...”

“... for the average, out-of-shape voyeur. Of course, Hastings does have some professional artists – John Bratby, for instance. When he exhibited locally, some arse-licker left his address and wrote, ‘Wonderful, just like Vincent,’ in the Visitors’ Book. I couldn’t resist adding ‘Price’ in the same writing. In the evenings, there are the pubs – the ...”