“... 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 ...”

“... of two steel blocks each by Richard Serra (for obvious reasons neither will be moved anytime soon).Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, calls the new design ‘smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless’. I would take ‘slightly soulless’ over ‘aggressively spectacular’, and given the political controversies visited on ...”

“... for a Western life.Fitzpatrick makes clear just how frustrating Soviet officials found Allied foot-dragging on repatriation. They asked for lists of DPs only to be told that all Soviets had already been repatriated; they asked to interview camp residents only to find, when they arrived, that all Russian speakers had vanished. They put pressure on people ...”

“... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...”

“... A spectacular new museum and conference centre, Titanic Belfast, whose façade replicates four 90-foot hulls, stands near where the Titanic’s hull was launched into the River Lagan. It opened last year and houses exhibitions dedicated to Harland & Wolff and its most famous ship and is itself the anchor of the Titanic Quarter, an urban regeneration project ...”

“... of a leadership election among Conservative MPs in which she secured more votes than her rival Michael Heseltine but not quite enough to prevent the contest going to a second round. At that point her cabinet collectively turned against her and let her know that she needed to step down for their sake. They couched it as a plea to save the party from ...”

“... appreciation of the art of our time than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on ...”

“... drank until my thirst was assuaged. After that I cut the shoe and tied its uppers on my foot with the rope off the well and bits of cloth.’ All this was before the days of Willis and Geiger and other suppliers of ‘strong shoes for walking’, but there’s a parable here for the modern hiker, to do with divesting yourself of the thing you hold ...”

“... a bibliography. He is what he watches, late at night. Charles Hawtrey, in his youthful pomp, in Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale. Hawtrey (pre-booze) with Will Hay. James Fox’s strangulated Elephant and Castle in Performance. Hitchcock’s expressionist version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Seabrook’s work, before the wonderful accident of All the ...”

“... thought, given the Australian philosophy of always trying to keep your opponents on the back foot, turned out to be the most fateful he ever made. India went on to score 657-7 in their second innings, with the previously unheralded V.V.S. Laxman making 281 of the runs. The Australians, unused to being so comprehensively outmanoeuvred, then collapsed when ...”

“... York, Big Blue set up their big baby: an $X million RS/6000 SP supercomputer comprising two six-foot boxes each housing 15 workstations running in parallel, each workstation containing 16 dedicated chess chips. Its combined maximum search speed was 200 million positions per second. Down the corridor, in a book-lined study, Garry Kasparov was installed, with ...”

“... and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the difference engine; in Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron; in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein’s monster’s creator; in everyone’s connections and ...”

“... The conspirators emerged into the open to confront him. ‘The chief rebel came in and kicked my foot to wake me. In the frame of the door I could pick out three figures: all my sons, lined up for maximum solidarity.’ They inform him that they’ve decided he must rescind his retirement and recommit to the job. They tell him there’s a lot more success he ...”

“... descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a journal – to chronicle, reflect and confess. When he died of fever six years later, Anne Hathaway kept the parrot, and introduced into its cage a younger ...”

“... and his wife Jill told me about life on this coast, ‘the back of the hill’ behind the 2000-foot peaks of Hecla and Beinn Mhor. I had hoped to meet them again this week – I wrote to them in March, but her brother replied from Devon that both had died. We’re steering for Mol a Dheas (‘shingle-beach of the south’) because the bearer of one of the ...”