“... More often, though, they end up forgetting what it was that made them average – no left foot, slow on the turn, weak in the air – and forgetting, too, the safety ploys they had developed in order to disguise their averageness. And this can make for some weird and wonderful defensive cock-ups. Still, who would rather be watching Leeds United? For ...”

“... in the world when it was wrecked in the late 16th century. The ship gave its name to Port Saint John, where it is believed to have sunk on its return from Cochin China, with a cargo of spices and china, but my friend has been picking up a quantity of cannonshot as well as pieces of willow pattern-like china. Drilling down into the sandbank at the edge of ...”

“... piece of water,” said Captain Hamilton.’ He has many other matters to occupy him, sailing a 37-foot boat alone, but he still has an eye for a funny piece of water. Speaking as one who has occasionally seen some funny water, I can say that I have rarely if ever seen its funniness so accurately described as it is here – not by Conrad, not by anybody in ...”

“... tragedy. Denied the dignity of his tragic heroism, the noble Hamlet is a destructive force. In John Updike’s recent novel Gertrude and Claudius, Hamlet is still more unlovable. He is coldly manipulative, while his kingly father is reduced to a clumsy and egotistical bully. Updike is also engaged in an act of rehabilitation. But he turns his attention to ...”

“... his girlfriend’s thigh’) into tense alignment with the musicians, who ‘keep holding on// a foot off the ground,/but holding’. Yet how long, the poem also asks, can this ‘rope of cries’ take the strain? the bass and drums are about to fly off the beat and lose the soloist orbiting round it but don’t, somehow For the Beats, in their ...”

“... while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush. How will the US ...”

“... in the poet’s breath has communicated itself to the painter’s brush, which rushes at the five-foot width of the canvas in a wild rolling scumble – here hitting deep bronze-russets, there scudding patina-green moonshine – performing a kind of love dance around the dreaming female. (Cold must have quickened the pace too. Following Millais’s customary ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... and friendly, ‘a tough old Clydeside revolutionary’ and a war hero with a partly wooden foot and a special medal, who had educated himself into ‘a passionate interest in literature’. When the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s ...”

“... a hundred years before Parliament paid out about five times that amount to the ‘lone genius’ John Harrison in 1773 for the magnificent marine chronometer that provided a working solution to the longitude problem. The patent Hooke wanted was a type of ‘Letters Patent’ – literally ‘open letters’, sealed but not sealed up, conferring the special ...”

“... It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants ...”

“... has eluded them, and its subject is one of the four or five people who stick in my gullet. John Traill Christie was my headmaster for just over four years. I never knew him well, though I have had to think about him a lot. For a brief period I must have occupied his thoughts because he spent about a term and a half, which coincided with some of ...”

“... Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of Chastity, in front of which danced nine 15-foot golden trees. At the end of the dance, each tree opened to reveal a masquer, richly clad in the costume of a ‘wodewose’, or wild man. Early modern playhouses like the Globe could manage nothing on this scale; yet the anonymous Sir Clyomon and Sir ...”

“... a permanent Venetian consulate had been established there, and 150 since the third English consul, John Eldred (who sailed to Aleppo on the Tiger, like the man the witch in Macbeth plans to kill), observed that it had been described so often it was hardly worth saying anything more about it. For Ralph Fitch, in 1594, Aleppo must have seemed one of the least ...”

“... I am on the right track, but it is clearly possible that the extremely expert Debbie read the two-foot thick manuscript of her husband’s book and decided that it was so boring it wouldn’t sell. And in this context, you have to appreciate that ‘unsaleability’ has nothing to do with sales in Waterstone’s or W. H. Smith’s: the real money is made for ...”