“... sentence for armed robbery, which makes him sound dangerous and exciting. Far from it. He’s five foot nothing, wears thick spectacles, speaks slowly with a broad Dublin accent and is polite to strangers. He was 56 at the time of the robbery. He was gambling in the Chinese Club in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, and he’d run out of money. It was 3 a.m. A few ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads ...”

“... riddles. ‘In the right coat pocket … one great piece of coarse-cloth, large enough to be a foot-cloth for your majesty’s chief room of state’ (a handkerchief). In the left, ‘a huge silver chest’ full of dust that sets the officers ‘both a sneezing’ (a snuff box). In the waistcoat there’s ‘a prodigious bundle of white thin substances ...”

“... and influential writers and preachers of his age to a dull and worthy figure. Both Greaves and Michael Davies appear to accept, and even collude with, Bunyan’s diminished presence in contemporary British culture. Bunyan, however, remains an enduring presence in Ulster Protestantism. In a lecture given many years ago, ‘The Triumph of the Word of God in ...”

“... come out in English until 2012, but it still isn’t very reader-friendly: it has no introduction (Michael Smith adds a brief translator’s note), sketchy endnotes and no index. It’s basically Lefort’s doctoral thesis, though he was pushing fifty by the time it saw the light of day in French. His thesis supervisor, Raymond Aron, described its style as ...”

“... poets [i.e. classical writers], because they said that a line consisted of feet, but we say that a foot consists of lines.’ The hendecasyllable line has a heavy stress on the tenth syllable, and it has a caesura, but beyond that it is a very fluid and flexible affair. Often one’s ear detects three main stresses (‘Nel mézzo del cammín di nostra ...”

“... the crash, of Dodi having received phone-calls over dinner, calls warning him that something was a foot. One call had made him ‘extremely tense’. Soon afterwards, he ‘decided to leave the hotel’. This story, reported in al-Ahram, seems to have originated in a French magazine called Nouveau Détective. On one of the two evenings I spent in Cairo, I went ...”

“... was a very, very dangerous job,’ Albertina says. ‘We used to put a plank down, 70 foot high, then run across [that] plank carrying another plank. No harnesses, we’d just run across. You had to have bottle. A lot of the Scotland Road lads went over and did the job. And there were a lot of Birkenhead lads, who’d come from similar areas. Some ...”

“... of Skopelos to the chariots often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the ...”

“... kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity’ to the unctuous ‘Empire-Lite’ of Michael Ignatieff and the ‘liberal imperialism’ peddled by Robert Cooper, one of Blair’s fly-by-night gurus. ‘Islamofascism’ seemed as evil as Nazism, Saddam Hussein was another Hitler, a generation-long battle loomed, and invocations of Winston ...”

“... of India. For three years, Hooker travelled through India, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan by foot, pony and elephant; climbed mountains up to a height of almost 20,000 feet (at which elevation he confessed he was a ‘gone coon’); tried (against vigorous opposition from the local rulers) to get into Tibet – and may have done so, since the borders ...”

“... tied to the ankle with ribbons, and hers are of ‘pale pink, piggy leather’, fastened to her foot with a thick strip of elastic. They notice each other, not least because their ‘shade of brown was exactly the same – as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both.’ So here is difference despite sameness, and a twinning effect. Many ...”

“... is not a random choice. Reading Price’s extracts from the self-dramatising journal kept by Michael Leiris in the Thirties in which he describes how he robbed masks and fetishes in Africa, it is hard not to dream about returning them (and Leiris, bound hand and foot) to the tribes in question. Reading her detailed ...”

“... romantic hero of his early novels, Andrews in The Man Within, Oliver Chant in Name of Action, and Michael Crane in Rumour at Nightfall. There is too much self-love, too little self-criticism in these early portraits of pleasant anguished young men built up from Greene’s own notion of himself as a young man romantically caught in the toils of love.’ The ...”